Where this summary comes from
Scataglini S, Van Orden F, van den Hoek E, Stessel M, Truijen S. Smartphone and tablet-based 3D scanner for anthropometric assessments in adults: a systematic review of reliability, validity, and accuracy. BioMedical Engineering OnLine, 2025. PMID 41351011.
The paper itself — doi.org/10.1186/s12938-025-01480-8
Study design: Systematic review, no meta-analysis · 13 studies from 2,172 screened · healthy adults
What the paper asked
How repeatable are body measurements from a phone or tablet 3D scanner — fat mass, body-fat percentage, body mass, fat-free mass, waist-to-hip ratio — and how well do they agree with reference methods such as DXA?
What was found
- Fat mass came out best: repeatability with ICC above 0.9, and against the reference method R² generally above 0.9 — the lowest 0.837.
- One app gave almost identical numbers on an iPhone 12 Pro and a Galaxy S21: ICC between the two phones 0.997 to 1.000.
- Multi-camera systems — such as the iPhone's TrueDepth and LiDAR — generally outperformed apps working from a single ordinary camera.
- Certainty of evidence (GRADE) was highest for fat mass, a step lower for body-fat percentage, moderate for body mass and fat-free mass, and lowest for waist-to-hip ratio and appendicular lean mass.
What does not follow from it
- No meta-analysis was possible: populations, reference methods and technologies were too varied for the studies' numbers to be pooled.
- Many studies had small samples; more than 12,000 of the participants came from a single cohort study.
- Every participant was a healthy adult. Nothing here extends to patients, children or elite athletes.
- The review is about specific commercial apps, not about any scan whatsoever. The authors themselves call for larger, standardised validation studies before clinical use.
What it means for someone here
This clinic's 3D body scan is taken with a phone's LiDAR sensor — the family that beat a single camera in this review. But the review is about other people's apps, not our software, and we borrow no credibility from it. That is why our report gives body-fat percentage with the equation's error band, drops any number the scan cannot honestly support and says why, and tracks change by comparing a person's scan with their own next one — where the errors that repeat cancel out.
This page summarises one study. It is not treatment advice, and no programme is written for a person from a single paper.