Abstract:
Introduction: Obesity is a disease that can affect the normal life of an individual due to its effect on cardiovascular, renal, and orthopedic pathology. People become obese due to hereditary influence, nutritional deficit, high calorie consumption, and lack of physical activities.
Overweight individuals are inclined to measure the percent body fat constantly and reduce body fat by fasting and excess physical activity. Currently, DEXA (dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry) is a gold standard to measure percent body fat. This machine is used at research centers and hospitals. One of the instruments readily available on the market is manufactured by the Omron Corporation and is extremely popular. OMRON's Fat Loss Monitor estimates the body fat percentage by using the Bioelectrical Impedance (BI) Method. The muscles, blood vessels and bones are body tissues that have a high-water content that conduct electricity easily. It is not clear how Omron developed the algorithm to measure body fat and validated their data. The purpose of this research is to validate Omron percent body fat measuring instrument.
Method: This research used Omron hand-held machine to measure percent body fat on thirty randomly selected college students that included fifteen men and fifteen women, age ranged 22-30 years. Each of the subject’s percent body fat was collected by changing their age to 20, 40, 60 and gender. Irrespective of change in age and gender, the body fat percentage should not vary because the subjects are the same and the Bioelectrical Impedance (BI) should be the same.
Results & Recommendations: There is a high correlation between the age groups and groups by gender. There is a significant difference in body fat between the groups at p=0.0 level (dependent t-test, df=29). In conclusion, there should not be any difference between group means. The Omron researchers included age and gender as variables in their algorithm to calculate body fat. Therefore, the mean of groups consistently higher for older age groups and females without any change in subjects who is taking the test. Results indicate that as you increase your age, the body fat measure increased by 20% and when you change the gender, the body fat changes to 15% higher for the same age. The two factors that will affect measurement of body fat are adipose tissue and water. This indicates that the Omron percent body fat measuring instrument is invalid.
