title: A Smartphone Application for Personal Assessments of Body Composition and Phenotyping.
abstract: Personal assessments of body phenotype can enhance success in weight management but are limited by the lack of availability of practical methods. We describe a novel smart phone application of digital photography (DP) and determine its validity to estimate fat mass (FM). This approach utilizes the percent (%) occupancy of an individual lateral whole-body digital image and regions indicative of adipose accumulation associated with increased risk of cardio-metabolic disease. We measured 117 healthy adults (63 females and 54 males aged 19 to 65 years) with DP and dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) and report here the development and validation of this application. Inter-observer variability of the determination of % occupancy was 0.02%. Predicted and reference FM values were significantly related in females (R² = 0.949, SEE = 2.83) and males (R² = 0.907, SEE = 2.71). Differences between predicted and measured FM values were small (0.02 kg,p= 0.96 and 0.07 kg,p= 0.96) for females and males, respectively. No significant bias was found; limits of agreement ranged from 5.6 to -5.4 kg for females and from 5.6 to -5.7 kg for males. These promising results indicate that DP is a practical and valid method for personal body composition assessments.
authors.affiliation: Section of Clinical Nutrition and Nutrigenomic, Department of Biomedicine and Prevention, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Rome 00173, Italy. gianluca.farina@students.uniroma2.eu.
authors.forename: Gian Luca
authors.initials: GL
authors.lastname: Farina
authors.affiliation: Section of Clinical Nutrition and Nutrigenomic, Department of Biomedicine and Prevention, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Rome 00173, Italy. fabrizio.spataro@students.uniroma2.eu.
authors.forename: Fabrizio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Spataro
authors.affiliation: Section of Clinical Nutrition and Nutrigenomic, Department of Biomedicine and Prevention, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Rome 00173, Italy. delorenzo@uniroma2.it.
authors.forename: Antonino
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: De Lorenzo
authors.affiliation: Department of Kinesiology and Public Health Education, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND 58202-7166, USA. henry.lukaski@email.und.edu.
authors.forename: Henry
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lukaski
mesh_terms: D015502:Absorptiometry, Photon; D050154:Adiposity; D000328:Adult; D059925:Anatomic Landmarks; D001823:Body Composition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008297:Male; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010641:Phenotype; D000068997:Smartphone; D012984:Software
keywords: body composition assessment; mobile health; weight management