Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 calculates body fat from the wrist. Use water proportion to calculate your body composition.
The world’s leading company announced yesterday that Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch 4 with BIA has functions to calculate body fat percentage and lean muscle mass. Just like Amazon, it has a body fat percentage on its halo belt.
Body fat is usually a better measure of health than weight, but it is usually calculated using an indicator called body mass index (BMI).
If wearables are accurate, they can provide people with better resources to monitor you, Diana Thomas, a mathematician who studied weight management at West Point, told The Rand in June.
Does BIA have limitations?
Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) includes the transmission of weak currents through the body. It calculates the amount of water in the body.
The signal travels faster in tissues with higher water content. Since fat has a higher water content than muscle, you can use this technique to estimate the fat content in the human body.
Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 calculates body fat from the wrist https://t.co/naFNqNwjlF pic.twitter.com/yPB0P8kYMk
— The Verge (@verge) August 12, 2021
In an email to The Verge, Thomas said that BIA could provide estimates of body fat, but it has certain limitations. Based on the available information, she will still not use it in research; the potential error rate calculated in the research is too high.
He said, “face-to-face contact may be okay.” Samsung’s method is different from the body composition analysis function of Amazon Halo. First, Halo only calculates body fat, not muscle. This app invites users to take photos of their bodies and then combine them into usable 3D images.
Is it an Amazon-funded study?
According to a study funded by Amazon, the system can also accurately measure body fat compared to DXA.
At least these two applications are better than BMI in calculating body fat percentage. Samsung shrunk down the sensors used for bioelectrical impedance analysis and added them to the watch.
It guides medical decisions when they are often misleading, distorting the diagnosis of certain medical conditions, and perpetuating weight-based stigma in health care. However, it is used because it is cheap and easy.
More research is needed to understand how reliable portable devices are in the real world while at the same time being easy to use and relatively cheap. If they can well identify trends in body composition that may affect their health, you can get these health indicators more easily.
Certainly, there may be a high chance of buying proportion for Samsung Watch compared to Amazon Halo.
Image courtesy of Droid Life/YouTube