Bioelectrical impedance analysis

I was always told BMI, you know, your BMI is high, but you're OK because you play sports.

So kind of combining those two experiences when I interviewed with InBody, I was very skeptical of BIA technology.

And they said, we appreciate that because I've used it before and I didn't think it was very accurate.

They said, we love that skepticism.

We think you're going to like what we have.

And so after learning more about it, we have a really intensive training.

At Embody for the employees to understand BIA, what makes us unique in the market and so on and so forth.

And so through that process, I was my eyes were open to our proprietary way of obtaining body composition measurements.

So It's not the most practical approach for sure, but it is very effective and is nice and accurate.

Next here is the bioelectrical impedance tool, okay? Bioelectrical impedance is a very funny tool.

What it looks like is almost like a little half steering wheel that you hold with both hands, okay? And on where you put your hands, there's little metal strips similar to that on like a treadmill, okay? What bioelectrical impedance does is it runs a very low intensity electrical current through the body.

So through your hands, down to your feet, back through the body.

That current is traveling through everything water soluble because we know water can conduct electricity, right? So it's traveling through the body and we also have lots of water inside our muscle, in our blood.

It's gonna be a little bit of a difficult tool in terms of different factors that can change and lead to errors.

Couple of the drawbacks that I mentioned here is that it's very sensitive to hydration status.

If we test an athlete's body composition but they're very dehydrated, well then the bioelectrical impedance is not going to be traveling through as much water And so it may overestimate that athlete's body fat percentage because it's not really traveling through as much water as they would if it was hydrated.

Yes.

And in physics, that tissue resistance is known as bioimpedance.

Bioimpedance.

Okay.

The RF machine isn't just blindly firing energy into the body.

And one of the sources, the Women's Health Clinic document, it brought up a metric I'd never heard of in this context, which was bioimpedance.

Oh, yeah.

Bioimpedance is fascinating.

It's essentially a measurement of electrical resistance.

So think of a dry household sponge versus a damp sponge.

Um, it estimates bone density by comparing your weight on land versus underwater.

Uh, research comparing modern multi-frequency BIA devices, which is the InBody 380, to underwater weighing has generally found average differences of two to four percent body fat with much greater convenience and no need to be submerged in water.

All right? So again, two to four percent change, um, from the InBody to underwater weighing.

So again, I think I'll take a two to four percent potential to be off if it means I don't have to be held underwater, you know, every time I wanna see my body mass.