I-Corps: Nutritional and health risk assessment pre-screening tool based on 3D optical scanning

Pennington Biomedical Research Ctr, Baton Rouge LA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project will be that it can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in health assessment costs by reducing costs associated with manual labor for the individualized care required at biometric screenings and the amount of time spent by medical experts. It will allow practitioners to "triage" their screenings by identifying people who are at high risk of developing metabolic and cardiovascular diseases for further in-depth evaluations. Moreover, this I-Corps project can reduce legal liability and risk associated with biometric screenings as the technology relies on 3D optical scanning technology, which is non-invasive and non-intrusive. This I-Corps project will be one of the first to commercialize a non-invasive, non-intrusive, and fully automated health pre-screening tool based on 3D optical scanning. It is a web application that analyzes a 3D optical scan of a human subject and provides a detailed report on the subject's fitness and wellness status. A unique feature of the web application is that it can accommodate data from most currently available 3D optical scanners whose current system outputs are machine-specific and whose outputs are now very limited in their contents. More specifically, the technology quantifies a subject's body size and shape by applying geometrical mathematics on the subject's 3D optical scan and then uses machine learning approaches to estimate the subject's fitness and wellness status including the subject's body composition and risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.