A light electrical current is transmitted through your body for BIA.
AURA Band takes your pulse every 15 minutes when you’re at rest and constantly when you’re working out
A light electrical current is transmitted through your body for BIA. Fat-free mass contains mostly water, while fat contains very little water. Thus, fat-free mass will have less resistance to an electrical current. By determining the resistance of a current running through your body, the ratio of fat-free and fat mass can be obtained. BIA can also assess the hydration of soft tissue (i.e., body fluid volume) using a specific formula.
However, the convenience of this method comes at a price of accuracy. The main challenge with BIA is that in most BIA devices its composition prediction is based on another prediction, because it is calibrated against other methods like hydrostatic (underwater) weighing or DEXA that have their own challenges. However, our BIA device and related algorithms were calibrated by their assessment against direct tissue weighing. In addition, this calibration was improved by BIA prediction of clinical (disease), biochemical (like lipids, proteins, glucose in blood) and physiological (e.g., EMG, ECG, duplex doppler ultrasonography) outcomes in samples of patients with metabolic and cardiovascular diseases and normal subjects.
Moreover, while some BIA devices may not be very accurate to compare body compositions between individuals, they work better when tracking change over time with longer time intervals being more accurate. Constant body and hand positions are very important during BIA for increasing change accuracy because they influence the distribution both of blood in parts of the body and the fluids in different (e.g., the stomach/intestine, lung) tissues. Proper body contacts with electrodes, excluding extra cross-links like in wet hands or hand-undressed chest contacts to prevent the possibility of the current following the path of least resistance is another way to increase the accuracy.
