Body Composition
This first-of-its-kind study investigated the feasibility of using digital anthropometric tools, specifically Size Stream’s Mobile Fit app, to assess body size and composition in patients with late-stage knee osteoarthritis scheduled for total knee arthroplasty. Alongside mobile 3D scanning, the study combined digital pain mapping and standardized physical performance tests to comprehensively characterize the clinical phenotypes of this patient population across varying levels of disability severity.
The findings demonstrate that mobile 3D body scanning is feasible in a real-world orthopedic clinic setting and capable of revealing clinically meaningful body composition data, including elevated central adiposity and reduced muscle mass, that BMI alone cannot capture. This opens a practical pathway for integrating digital anthropometry into pre-operative assessments, potentially improving risk stratification and post-surgical outcome prediction for patients undergoing joint replacement surgery.
Key takeaway
This first-of-its-kind study deployed Size Stream’s Mobile Fit app in late-stage knee osteoarthritis patients, demonstrating that 30-second smartphone scans are feasible in a real-world orthopedic clinic and reveal clinically richer data than BMI alone, with digital anthropometry identifying excess central adiposity in 75–84% of patients and enabling the first smartphone-based assessment of appendicular lean mass, a known predictor of post-operative recovery. Physical performance measures, not body composition, distinguished high from low severity subgroups, underscoring the value of combining digital anthropometry with functional testing. Together, these tools form a low-burden, tablet-deployable pre-operative phenotyping protocol that positions Size Stream as the body composition layer of a next-generation assessment workflow for joint replacement patients.