Theory and Practical Steps to Introducing a New 3D Public Health Indicator to Replace BMI Using Existing Population-Based Multidimensional Reference Measurement Sets

Abstract

Body Mass Index is an aging public health indicator obesity measurement, based solely on height and weight. Despite its shortcomings, it has gained acceptance over time primarily because of its simplicity, and it has been applied not only to individuals, but also to various population groups. Calls to replace BMI with a more modern indicator within the medical community have been growing louder, but the medical community moves very slow and acceptance of a multidimensional health indicator appears to most to be far off. However, by using multinational 3D sizing studies done over the years by the clothing industry, the introduction of a 3D public health indicator as well as a multidimensional population measurement reference set can be implemented in the very near future.

Anthropometric Indicators as a Tool for Diagnosis of Obesity and Other Health Risk Factors: A Literature Review

“…The body measurements obtained with these new technologies have been correlated with reference methods (Ng et al, 2016;Bourgeois et al, 2017;Tinsley et al, 2020). In addition, these novel technologies have opened a way to evaluate other body parameters such as surface areas or AHIs shape descriptors (Stefan et al, 2014;Lu et al, 2018), whose application has even been improved by machine learning techniques (Harty et al, 2020).…”

“…The indices are proposed by Stefan et al (2014) and Stefan and Gilbert (2015) and are based on measurements (linear and circumferential measurements, volume, and surface data) obtained from 3D scans of torso segments in morbidly obese individuals.…”

Assessment of Abdominal Obesity using 3D Body Scanning Technology

“…Paired t-test analysis showed the significant values * p<0.05, **p<0.01. Denotes: waist circumference (WC), hip circumference (HC), and waist-hip ratio (WHR) the inaccuracies of manual anthropometric measurements (Stefan et al 2011). The automated measurements showed higher percentages of subjects with abdominal obesity compared to the manual measurements in all BMI categories except for the underweight category (Table 2).…”

Longitudinal Statistical Analysis of Weight, Volume, Surface Area and Circumferential Measurements for a Female Bariatric Population

“…Previous papers have been published about the BariPlex and the TVSA Ratio 5 . The TVSA ratio uses the Torso Volume divided by the Torso Surface area.…”