Track your body fat directly from your smartphone cover, Samsung’s patent reveal
Staying fit is something you can see in almost everyone’s New Year resolutions list. It’s also the resolution that people fails to achieve more often than not. Are you also one of them, you promised yourself to eat fewer cookies and more salad but that resolution just ate dust later?
One third of the world’s population is struggling with obesity. People make diet plans, use several services and monitor their progress using hundreds of gadgets. Fitness bands and smartwatches have become our best companions to make sure that we don’t miss our fitness resolutions anymore.
Smartphones also joined the league of fitness tracking in past years when apps like Google Fit, Endomondo, and iCardio jumped in the market. Since then, our gadgets are always improving and becoming more and more reliable for our health. You can now even check your blood sugar levels through smart watches.
And now, Samsung has filed a patent of a smartphone cover that can accurately calculate body fat levels right through your palms. Samsung has always been more health centric with its flagship of Gear smartwatches and applications like S-health and S-Eye. This could be their way to fill the gap as there is no fat calculating watch or a smartphone in the market.
The new cover works just like any other bioelectric impedance analysis (BIA) gadget. It will come with a companion app on your smartphone that’ll show you the measured value.
The cover will have 4 electrodes on its surface that will pass a small charge through your body and calculate the resistance. Then you have to provide your bodily measures like weight and age etc. (just like you do in other fat calculating machines) to the app and it will tell you the exact amount of fat in your body.
The BIA method was considered one of the poorest methods to calculate body fat but, over the past few years these gadgets have drastically improved and now it has become a standard and reliable method to measure fat levels.
The results that BIA gadgets provide, however, can vary between meal times and so, you may have to consider the timing as well. This could be highly demanding feature of a smartphone as all the other metrics like, blood sugar and glucose levels, calorie counts, etc. are already there.
My previous article:
I’ve just started writing and need your feedback to improve :)
