Validation of Smartphone-Based Photogrammetric 3D Body Scanning for Automated Anthropometric Measurements Compared with a Commercial Depth-Sensor-Based Body Scanner

Abstract

The rapid and non-invasive nature of 3D body scanning has made it an important tool in healthcare applications. While smartphone-based photogrammetric reconstruction provides a low-cost and accessible alternative to commercial 3D body scanners, its performance for whole-body scanning remains insufficiently validated. Thus, we designed this paper to comprehensively validate the photogrammetric 3D scanning application by evaluating automatically extracted whole-body measurements and longitudinal body-shape monitoring. We evaluated a representative application, PolyCam, against the commercial depth-sensor-based Fit3D ProScanner using 144 pregnant participants scanned longitudinally throughout pregnancy. We designed an automatic circumference extraction pipeline to obtain measurements at four anatomical landmarks from paired 3D scans. A linear mixed-effects model was used to evaluate scanner effects and longitudinal body-shape changes. Measurement consistency was assessed using repeated PolyCam scans and tape measurements on a rigid mannequin. PolyCam demonstrated strong agreement with Fit3D with average biases below 16 mm, intraclass correlation coefficients above 0.8, and Pearson correlation coefficients above 0.9 across all landmarks. Both systems captured comparable longitudinal body-shape changes. Mannequin experiments showed mean biases below 3.5 mm and no significant differences from tape measurements. These findings support smartphone photogrammetry as a potential accessible alternative to commercial body scanners that is applicable for longitudinal 3D body-shape assessment.