Frequently Asked Questions

The Body Volume Index is a predictive risk indicator for three of the most significant diseases in global healthcare; diabetes, cardiovascular risk and hypertension. There are two BVI outputs for this service, a quartile of risk and a number which ranges on a scale from 0-20. The current and most often used Body Mass Index (BMI) scale is between 18-35. After consultation with our healthcare collaborators, the BVI range was designed to provide an alternative number to BMI that could be used either in isolation as an improved indicator, or in conjunction with BMI to allow for re-evaluation of a person’s individual risk.

BVI was invented in 2006 by Select Research, who have been pioneers in digital body measurement for over 25 years. From 2007, international researchers and medical organisations created the BVI algorithms -which were validated by Mayo Clinic- leading to the API service you can use today.

The images are needed to process and get accurate data but they are never stored.

Significant and high profile collaborators have been involved in development of BVI over the past 15 years, which have included validation on the following:- Waist Circumference Waist to Hip Ratio Hip Circumference BVI Total Body Fat to MRI BVI Visceral Fat to MRI BVI Total Body Fat to Bio-Impedance BVI Total Volume to BodPod BVI Body Fat to DEXA BVI as a weight motivation tool BVI as a risk indicator for the metabolic syndrome With the metabolic syndrome, BVI was validated against BMI and showed a 19% improvement over BMI for the prediction of risk. BMI is manual and from 1835, so it is only right now for us to have something better to use in the digital age.

Your API key will be sent to the email address you used to register with once it has been confirmed.

To ensure accurate results, input images should contain only the scan subject, be of neutral tilt and be taken against a clear background. For more information see the image specification.

Rates for every service package can be found on our services and plans page here.

A 400 error code indicates that the request is not valid. Common reasons could be that the "Content-Type" header of the request is not set to "multipart/form-data", that the images do not meet the specification outlined in the image specification or that the age, height or weight parameters fall outside of the permitted ranges. See the API documentation for more information.

Setting the test mode parameter allows you to test the API without spending any account credit. When the test mode parameter is set to true, the API will process your request in the same manner as a regular request, but will return a completely random set of results not related to the input data. This allows you to test request models, response models and error cases without having to spend account credit.

BVI technology was created by combining thousands of 3D body scans and matching these with MRI data of the same people. By using the “Test it Out” button, you can see the full range of measurements generated from the API.