While there are a lot of things that our smartphone and wearables can do in terms of tracking our activities and measuring our health through various sensors and features, one thing they haven’t been able to do yet is to measure body fat, which is an important thing to know if you’re trying to lose weight or you’re monitoring your body. A new patent by Samsung may very well solve that if things go according to plan, and maybe you wouldn’t even need to buy a new device.
The patent that the Korean OEM filed talks about four sensors that are in or near a phone, which may mean that if the sensor isn’t embedded in the phone itself, it may be a peripheral accessory like a case. These sensors will then work together to get the impedance level when the device comes into contact with the human body, like gripping the smartphone with both hands to come into contact with the sensors.
If you want to be vague and technical about it, Samsung in its patent filing said the technology will be “acquiring the object’s impedance information on the basis of the intensify of the input current and the intensity of the measured voltage; and acquiring the object’s body fat information on the basis of the impedance information.”
Looks like this is still a long way off for now, but it would sure be cool if eventually, this will happen and we’d have a way to accurately measure body fat, just through gripping on to your smartphone.
VIA: Venture Beat
