Seeing beyond BMI: Estimating cardiometabolic risk with smartphone imagery

faangguyindia•1 minute ago

Beating Smartwatch based Body Composition Analysis (using Bio impedance snalysis) approach isn't a great feat but this is promising.

Google PhotoScan (~2.1 pp MAE) may put it between DXA and well performed multi site Bodyfat Caliper by an skilled operator and WAY ABOVE US Navy circumference, consumer BIA (thought smart scale with handlebars), poorly performed calipers.

But i remember microsoft research paper:

>In 2022, a Microsoft Research associated team published “Smartphone camera based assessment of adiposity”. Their Visual Body Composition (VBC) system used ordinary smartphone photographs plus a CNN to predict body fat percentage against DXA. In a 134 person, two site validation cohort, it achieved 2.16 ± 1.54 percentage point mean absolute error, with concordance to DXA of CCC = 0.96.

kamranjon•about 1 hour ago

I wonder if this could be used by insurance companies to determine premiums?

tccole•about 1 hour ago

Why must you tempt the insurance companies

jgalt212•about 1 hour ago

because they ding you for high cholesterol regardless of what every other metric says.

ryukoposting•about 1 hour ago

And you think more data is going to stop them from doing that?

sgallant•about 2 hours ago

If this gets good enough, you could imagine your phone periodically tracking body composition and combining it with wearables, bloodwork, glucose, etc. Suddenly some measurements that currently require a clinic and specialized equipment become essentially free and continuous.

...at the same time, giving Google/Apple photos of your body is creepy

tccole•about 1 hour ago

I think the reasoning is that Google/Apple already have all your photos.

hnfwd5lqmp•26 minutes ago

Been meaning to try this myself

arenaninja•about 1 hour ago

I expect Apple Health to integrate this kind of cool functionality in the future. Heck, I'm not sure why I can't have it pull my labs by connecting other applications.

Jtsummers•about 1 hour ago

> Heck, I'm not sure why I can't have it pull my labs by connecting other applications.

You can do this by connecting to your provider already. Open Health, select the search (magnifying glass) icon, then scroll down and select "add account". If your provider is in there you can link them and see your labs in the app. With mine, the authorization to access is up to one year so it has to be renewed periodically.

agos•about 1 hour ago

is this one of those US only features?

Jtsummers•about 1 hour ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Healthcare_Interoperabili...

They seem to be using that. So only providers whose data is accessible via FHIR.

xattt•about 1 hour ago

Isn’t that what the whole HealthKit ecosystem is?

I thought this wasn’t fully implemented because incompetence and lack of tech foresight in healthcare systems, or because said data providers have realized the value of this info and won’t share it at the level of 2007 Facebook users.

bluGill•about 1 hour ago

> Heck, I'm not sure why I can't have it pull my labs by connecting other applications.

You shouldn't be able to. while the ability when used correctly would be very nice, there are too many scams/frauds and other abuses where that ability will be used against somebody. (maybe not you - if all you have is the same cholesterol as everybody else there isn't much gain from you - but some data is a lot more sensitive)

syntaxing•about 2 hours ago

I’m kinda surprised Apple doesn’t do something like this. I would imagine it’s a lot easier with phones with LiDAR

fsckboy•14 minutes ago

waist-to-hip ratio already took us beyond BMI, a long time ago.

gdevenyi•28 minutes ago

Google already has a product called PhotoScan.

Come on guys!

Seeing beyond BMI: Estimating cardiometabolic risk with smartphone imagery

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