Body Fat Percentage, Compare & other New Features
With our latest update, BodyBarista 4.0 can now measure your Body Fat percentage, compare any 2 photos from your History, and furthermore boasts a brand new Home screen, something we didn’t have up until now and will be a game changer.
Let’s take them one by one and see how they will affect your experience in the app.
1. Body Fat Percentage (BF%)
This feature is something we have been considering for a long time, and now we’ve finally decided to implement it – in a beta version.
Body Fat Percentage – or BF% – is the holy grail of body composition. Just imagine taking a selfie in the mirror and having an app tell you that percentage.
Accuracy is a tricky thing with BF%. The BIA scales that require you to stand on with your bare feet measure your body’s impedance and calculate the amount of body fat based on that. But they also measure what’s in your gut and in your bladder, and they estimate how long the path of electricity is from one foot to another (the length of your legs). A far more accurate way is to measure the amount of fat under your skin using statistical formulas to get the total fat percentage. These are called skinfold measurements and have been standardized to measurements at seven locations (Jackson & Pollock), mainly because it is manual work and needs to be convenient both for the person getting measured and the personal trainer doing the measurement.
The BodyBarista beta feature’s accuracy lies somewhere between the two measurement tools. We have, in the pipeline, the most accurate method for users, using fully automated machine learning. For now, we use some statistical regression methods. This means that the accuracy is 0.6 lower than skinfold measurements.
This may sound discouraging. The skinfold measurement is accurate within +/- 3.5% while BodyBarista, for now, is within +/- 5%. The electrical bathroom scale (BIA) has both a lower accuracy (as it doesn’t have the exact length of your arms and legs) and lower consistency (as it doesn’t have information about what is in your gut at a given moment). The exciting thing about BodyBarista is that, as our development continues, our future, more advanced algorithms will update your past measurements as you have access to your private and encrypted imagery from before.
2. Compare
Photo compare has been part of our app’s previous version, and it’s been a feature that many users enjoyed.
Now it’s back – for good.
Nothing beats seeing the progress. It’s a great ego-boost and a great motivation. Now you can zoom and pinch to see how you’re transforming those abdominals into a six pack or how those shoulders get skulpted into something taken from a Marvel hero magazine.
You can compare any photo set from your history in Journal, or compare your latest photo in Results. Just press “Photos >” under the heat map. Swap between initial and latest to compare to your first or your last image set.
3. New Home screen
The new Home screen is an improvement on the user experience of the app.
What is great about the bathroom scale is that you stand on it and get one, easy to read number.
BodyBarista is doing the same. Press the big measurement button, take your measurement mirror selfies and boom, you have your measurements as the combined total (Total inches or Total centimeters) or as your Fat %.
Even if your goal is to get bigger in some parts and get tighter in others, seeing your total go up and down is an instant gratification of your workout effort.
We also added a wallpaper to the home screen. BodyBarista is a private and personal measurement app and we want to make you feel that on the home screen. Therefore, with our next big update, we are making it possible for you to change the wallpaper just as you can in WhatsApp.
What’s next?
We are hoping these new features will improve and enrich your experience. They are the result of our efforts, and we’ll continue to refine them as we get feedback and move forward.
The journey continues. We are looking into introducing a new visual feature, as well as making the machine learning (this is what some people call artificial intelligence AI) smarter.
Any feedback, ratings & reviews are welcome!