Cole parameter estimation from total right side electrical bioimpedance spectroscopy measurements — Influence of the number of frequencies and the upper limit

Applications based on measurements of Electrical Bioimpedance Spectroscopy (EBIS) analysis are proliferating. The most spread and known application of EBIS is the non-invasive assessment of body composition. Fitting to the Cole function to obtain the Cole parameters, R₀ and R_∞, is the core of the EBIS analysis to obtain the body fluid distribution. An accurate estimation of the Cole parameters is essential for the Body Composition Assessment (BCA) and the estimation process depends on several factors. One of them is the upper frequency limit used for the estimation and the other is the number of measured frequencies in the measurement frequency range. Both of them impose requirements on the measurement hardware, influencing largely in the complexity of the bioimpedance spectrometer. In this work an analysis of the error obtained when estimating the Cole parameters with several frequency ranges and different number of frequencies has been performed. The study has been done on synthetic EBIS data obtained from experimental Total Right Side (TRS) measurements. The results suggest that accurate estimations of R₀ and R_∞ for BCA measurements can be achieved using much narrower frequency ranges and quite fewer frequencies than electrical bioimpedance spectrometers commercially available nowadays do.