Apple wants its devices to be better at analyzing users’ body composition as evidenced by a newly granted patent for “Electronic Devices With Body Composition Analysis Circuitry.”
About the patent
Obviously, electronic devices such as iPhones, Apple Watches and other equipment are sometimes provided with sensors such as fingerprint sensors, facial recognition cameras, and heart rate sensors. However, Apple says it can be challenging to use devices such as these.
Why? The user may wish to obtain different types of health-related information that traditional electronic devices are unable to provide. Also, the user may need to rely on more than one piece of electronic equipment to obtain the desired health-related information, which can be “inconvenient and cumbersome.”
Apple’s solution is an electronic device that includes body composition analysis circuitry that estimates body composition based on captured images of a face, neck, and/or body. In other words, depth map images would be captured by a depth sensor, visible light and infrared images captured by image sensors, and/or other suitable images.
Summary of the patent
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “The body composition analysis circuitry may analyze the image data and may extract portions of the image data that strongly correlate with body composition, such as portions of the cheeks, neck, waist, etc.
“The body composition analysis circuitry may encode the image data into a latent space. The latent space may be based on a deep learning model that accounts for facial expression and neck pose in face/neck images and that accounts for breathing and body pose in body images. The body composition analysis circuitry may output an estimated body composition based on the image data and based on user demographic information.”
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