Accuracy of Smart Scales on Weight and Body Composition: Observational Study
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Smart scales are increasingly used at home by patients to monitor their body weight and body composition, but scale accuracy has not often been documented. OBJECTIVE: The goal of the research was to determine the accuracy of 3 commercially available smart scales for weight and body composition compared with dual x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) as the gold standard. METHODS: We designed a cross-sectional study in consecutive patients evaluated for DEXA in a physiology unit in a tertiary hospital in France. There were no exclusion criteria except patient declining to participate. Patients were weighed with one smart scale immediately after DEXA. Three scales were compared (scale 1: Body Partner [Téfal], scale 2: DietPack [Terraillon], and scale 3: Body Cardio [Nokia Withings]). We determined absolute error between the gold standard values obtained from DEXA and the smart scales for body mass, fat mass, and lean mass. RESULTS: The sample for analysis included 53, 52, and 48 patients for each of the 3 tested smart scales, respectively. The median absolute error for body weight was 0.3 kg (interquartile range [IQR] -0.1, 0.7), 0 kg (IQR -0.4, 0.3), and 0.25 kg (IQR -0.10, 0.52), respectively. For fat mass, absolute errors were -2.2 kg (IQR -5.8, 1.3), -4.4 kg (IQR -6.6, 0), and -3.7 kg (IQR -8.0, 0.28), respectively. For muscular mass, absolute errors were -2.2 kg (IQR -5.8, 1.3), -4.4 kg (IQR -6.6, 0), and -3.65 kg (IQR -8.03, 0.28), respectively. Factors associated with fat mass measurement error were weight for scales 1 and 2 (P=.03 and P<.001, respectively), BMI for scales 1 and 2 (P=.034 and P<.001, respectively), body fat for scale 1 (P<.001), and muscular and bone mass for scale 2 (P<.001 for both). Factors associated with muscular mass error were weight and BMI for scale 1 (P<.001 and P=.004, respectively), body fat for scales 1 and 2 (P<.001 for both), and muscular and bone mass for scale 2 (P<.001 and P=.002, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Smart scales are not accurate for body composition and should not replace DEXA in patient care. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03803098; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03803098.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it