BIA measurements are taken by injecting a small alternating current into the body. By comparing the potential across the body to one across a known reference resistor, it is possible to determine the equivalent electrical components that model the body. BIA devices for consumer use are frequently employed in fitness centers and integrated into some bathroom scales. Unlike most medical-grade equipment a consumer BIA device is inexpensive;15 however, its internal functions represent a black box with proprietary algorithms that output a person’s body fat percentage (BF%) or FFM. On the other hand, standard voltage probes and data collection systems used in undergraduate laboratories are not designed to measure the high frequencies used in BIA. The use of an oscilloscope would not only be difficult for many pre-health majors, it also would pose safety concerns when leads from a wall-powered scope are connected to the body. To eliminate this risk and to explore the mechanism of how ac current is used in BIA, we designed our own battery powered educational BIA device, which is shown in Fig. 2. While a typical consumer device operates at a fixed frequency of 50 kHz, the educational device allows for a variable frequency (20Hz to 450kHz) and the exploration of both BIS and MF-BIA. As part of the activity, students use an inexpensive frequency counter 16 to measure the frequency settings of the device. A safety requirement of BIA devices is that the maximum current produced never exceeds 800lA.13 The educational BIA device outputs a constant current amplitude of 100lA. The total cost to build the described educational BIA device is less than $75. Reference 17 provides full specifications and circuit diagrams of the device. The BIA device is based on the AD8302 Gain and Phase Detector (Fig. 3), which can be used to find the impedance and phase of an RC circuit18 and has already been shown to work in a BIA device.19 The Gain and Phase Detector takes two sinusoidal signals as inputs and outputs two dc poten- tials, Vphase and Vmag. Here Vphase is proportional to the phase shift Du between the inputs, and Vmag is proportional to the
logarithm of the ratio of the connected impedance Z to the reference resistance Rref. Thus, we have Vphase / Du and Vmag / log10ðZ=RrefÞ. (See Ref. 18 for the full conversion formulas.) There are multiple methods of electrode placement in BIA including hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot, and hand-to-foot.13 Our device uses hand-to-hand electrodes that are designed with conductive tape on plastic tubing (Fig. 2). Four electrodes are needed for BIA, two electrodes to carry current and two to measure the potential across the body. Tetrapolar voltage probes minimize the effect of the skin-electrode impedance Zcontact on the measurement of the body’s impedance Zbody