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Fitness & Health

14th Jul 2015

Pic: You could soon be able to check your body fat with Samsung phones

Is there anything they can't do?

Conor Heneghan

If you want to, of course.

The list of things you can’t actually do using your mobile phone is dwindling by the day.

There was a time it was used only for making calls and sending texts, but now you can use it to shop, to book a holiday, to check your heart rate and to creep on people you went to school with catch up with old friends on Facebook.

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Samsung phones could soon include a facility where users can check their body fat, according to patent drawings that would appear to indicate that technology to do so is on the way.

The drawings appear to show a person gripping a phone with both hands, using sensors embedded in the phone itself to measure body fat levels similar to the way a person’s heart rate is currently measured.

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For now, the patents are merely that, patents, meaning there is no guarantee that such technology will make its way into the mainstream eventually.

Furthermore, whether such technology would be sufficiently accurate is another matter of debate, given that there are a number of factors that go into determining a person’s body fat that might be beyond the capabilities of sensors on a mobile phone.

Still, it’s interesting to see that such technology is even being explored in the first place, even if many of us may choose to avoid it with as much enthusiasm as we do the weighing scales at the moment.

Hat-tip to Business Insider

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