Human body weight

Strictly speaking, body weight is the measurement of mass without items located on the person.

Practically though, body weight may be measured with clothes on, but without shoes or heavy accessories such as mobile phones and wallets, and using manual or digital weighing scales.

Most involve a parent or health care provider guessing the child's weight through weight-estimation formulas.

These formulas base their findings on the child's age and tape-based systems of weight estimation.

[5] Ideal body weight (IBW) was initially introduced by Ben J. Devine in 1974 to allow estimation of drug clearances in obese patients;[6] researchers have since shown that the metabolism of certain drugs relates more to IBW than total body weight.

[7] The term was based on the use of insurance data that demonstrated the relative mortality for males and females according to different height-weight combinations.

The most common estimation of IBW is by the Devine formula; other models exist and have been noted to give similar results.

Machines like the dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry can accurately measure the percentage and weight of fat, muscle, and bone in a body.

Ideal body weight, specifically the Devine formula, is used clinically for multiple reasons, most commonly in estimating renal function in drug dosing, and predicting pharmacokinetics in morbidly obese patients.

[9][10] Data from 2005: Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a study of average weights of adult humans in the journal BMC Public Health and at the United Nations conference Rio+20.