Abstract:
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 always look for ways to control their body weight. They 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. However, common people are not able to buy due to the cost, and they buy unvalidated and cheap machines to measure percent body fat that is convenient. There are few instruments available in the market to measure the percent body fat. These machines estimate the body fat percentage by using the Bioelectrical Impedance (BI). Muscles, blood vessels and bones are body tissues that have a high-water content that conduct electricity easily. Body fat is a tissue that has little electrical conductivity. It is not clear how Omron developed the algorithm to measure body fat and validated their data. The purpose of this research is to measure the validity of Omron percentbody fat measuring instrument. Investigators 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 percent body fat should not vary because the subject is the same and the Bioelectrical Impedance (BI) should be the same.
