Reference design for a smart body fat scale that can display body weight, body mass index (BMI), body fat percentage and body impedance.
Are you a fitness freak or a health-conscious person who tries to keep fit, and body mass index (BMI) does not give the complete picture about fat percentage or your body composition. So, if you want to know your body composition or want to know if the mass/muscle ratio in the body is adequate, then this reference design will help you build your own smart body fat scale that can help you analyse your body composition.
The Smart Body Fat Scale from Renesas’ gives you complete information about your body composition. The reference design includes four weighing sensors along with four metal electrodes for body impedance measurement. The reference design also features Renesas RL78/L1A MCU then enables Bluetooth connectivity to the device.
The user just needs to feed information such as height, gender, and age, and the smart scale measures the weight and uses the four metal electrodes to measure impedance. The MCU utilizes all the above data to measure body fat percentage and other health parameters. The resulting value calculated from weight and bio-impedance can be displayed on an LCD monitor and checked through a smartphone application simultaneously. This solution features the RL78/L1A MCU integrated with rich analog peripherals and an LCD and the RL78/G1D MCU’s BLE communication function. It is suitable for healthcare bio-sensing applications.
The reference design has been tested by Renesas and is suitable for personal use only. The company claims that the reference design is suitable for non-medical devices. Renesas has provided all the required resources such as bills of materials, schematics, Gerber files, firmware, etc to simplify building it. You can read more about the reference design and download the resources from here.
