The business of body scanning

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Published Jan 7, 2017

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New York - Walk into David Barton's new gym in Manhattan,

TMPL, and you will be greeted by an array of high-tech fitness

options—fingerprint scanners, giant screens with lifelike landscapes behind the

Spin instructors, and a saltwater pool, all bathed in his trademark recessed

LED lighting. But the real game-changing gadget here is not on

the weight room floor. It's a Styku 3D body scanner, tucked away in a

room near the showers that's next to a minibar serving protein shakes.  

If history is any guide, next week millions of people

will make a New Year's resolution to go to one of the 180 000 gyms across

the globe in an annual, usually ineffective, effort to lose a few

pounds. The primary reason for this failure, according to the experts I spoke

to, is that checking your weight is a misguided, demoralizing way to

gauge overall health. "Many people are focused on the scale,"

said Mark de Gorter, chief executive officer of Workout Anytime. "But in

doing so, they lose the bigger picture of transforming the body."

Fitness gurus have long complained that the public's

myopic focus on weight is counterproductive. The same amount of

muscle weighs more than fat, after all, and yet fat takes up 22

percent more space, so the real measure should be volume. As you lose fat,

you literally shrink, a fact that you can feel in the fit of your clothes.

But it's hard to be objective when the scale is still creaking beneath your

feet.    

Enter the body scanner, which allows you to visualize

your muscle gain and see, in three dimensions, how you are losing fat—and

where. Companies such as Styku and Fit3D, which is available in

select Equinox gyms, use a powerful camera, housed in an aluminium

base about the size of a kid's tee-ball stand, to extract millions of

data points in fewer than 30 seconds. The machine takes

the surface measurements of your waist, chest, and arms and

then assembles a 3D model that can be rotated, panned, and zoomed from

over 600 infrared images. 

A growing trend

In the last year, health club execs such as De

Gorter have discovered that the technology is one of the most

effective ways to attract and retain clients. After testing it out at four

of her clubs, Diana Williams, who founded Fernwood Fitness in Melbourne 26

years ago and now has 70 franchises across the continent, was so impressed she

is rolling it out to her full network. "We use it as a selling tool but

more as a retention tool," she said. "A measurement is just a number.

But a visual image of what they look like, rather than their imagination,

is much more motivating."

Because it converts these measurements to

a metric that people can understand, it also makes for easy before-and-after

comparisons, said Raj Sareen, CEO of Los Angeles-based Styku, one of the

largest suppliers of body scanning technology to fitness clubs. The

company introduced the equipment at trade shows in 2015 after a pilot

program with smaller gyms; in the 12 months since, year-over-year growth

increased by 550 percent and it is now available in 350 locations in

25 countries around the world. It has been introduced most recently in Korea

and the U.K. and will launch at select gyms in Brazil

by early 2017. 

The technology is familiar to anyone who's raised their

hands overhead inside a scanner at an airport. It's built off the

innovations found in the motion-sensing technology of Microsoft's Kinect,

part of the Xbox One introduced in 2011. Using it is a straightforward process:

Stand on a raised circular platform that makes one 360-degree rotation while

an infrared camera in the nearby aluminium stand takes pictures

and then relays the information to a connected laptop.

Read also:  What your gym doesn't want you to know

David Barton, the fitness guru who in September opened

TMPL (pronounced "temple," as in your body is one), pairs the Styku

with an InBody machine, which measures body fat, and an on-site nutritionist to

create a diet around the findings. "The most efficient way to change the

outside is to know what's inside," he said. 

An accidental discovery

The technology was not initially designed for health

clubs. Sareen got his start by hacking into webcams and turning them into body

scanners, then really got into it when he saw the possibilities inherent

in Microsoft's Kinect, which could create lifelike 3D scans of objects with its

high-powered camera. In 2012, his proposal was one of only 11 accepted to Tech

Stars, the respected accelerator program, and he came out of it with a

business plan to market the technology to clothing

retailers in order to create clothes that would be the right

size every time. (In essence, the perfect virtual fitting room.) 

Sareen did a pilot program with Nordstrom while one

of his competitors, Bodymetrics, partnered with Bloomingdale's in New York and

Selfridge's in London. But the clothing industry is famously slow to adapt

to technology, and it wasn't the right environment, anyway. Turns out that

people were not ready for quite that level of reality while they were

shopping. "We tried plastic surgeons, spas, dermatologists," said

Sareen, but it wasn't until they went to health clubs that they found a

receptive environment.

Even then, though, De Gorter was lukewarm the first time

he saw it in action. "I thought seeing someone in 3d might be too

revealing and too weird, but that notion was blown out of the water by everyone

who tried it," he said. "Some people are a little reluctant to get on

it, and some people don't like the results. But it becomes a great validator, a

benchmark as they improve. Our early adopters saw the value in that right

away."

Until now, the only way to get an accurate measurement of

body fat was either through calipers—those small pliers that literally measure

the amount of loose skin around your waist and arms—or via MRI, which is not a

commercially viable proposition. But the Styku runs about $10,000 for a

franchise operator, with no recurring fees at the moment. Fernwood Fitness's

Williams says that the cost is a worthwhile investment, given the competitive

advantage. "It's an added service," she said. "We do charge for

it, but if someone's not motivated, we'll give them another scan at no charge

to keep them." She also offers short-term 12-week challenges at her

gyms, with Styku scans before and after "so they can see the

difference," she said. 

Beyond fitness

It's not just health clubs. The Fairmont Scottsdale

Princess and the Four Seasons Resort & Club Dallas at

Las Colinas have introduced the Bod Pod, an egg-like scanning technology that

measures muscle-to-fat ratio, so that their nutritionists can give

recommendations while clients are traveling for business or just taking a

few days off.

It may be available at the consumer level soon, as well.

Farhad Farahbakhshian, CEO of Naked, is developing a version of the

technology that works with your phone and can be set up at home.

His background is in electrical engineering and computer science, but some

work as a part-time Spin instructor gave him insight into what keeps

people motivated. 

"I saw people going through several New Year's

resolutions and it wasn't about motivation," he said. "Everyone is

motivated on the 1st of January." The main issue is that the more

motivated you are, the more you want to see the changes. But there was no way

to quantify that process, other than by weight. "People were making

tremendous progress, but their weight wasn't changing," he continued.

"They were using the wrong gauge to measure their progress."

He hopes to roll out a retail-friendly version of the

product by November, and he is optimistic that people will adopt it. "The

biggest challenge is just convincing people that it's real," he said.

"They think it's something you see in Star Trek."  

BLOOMBERG

 

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