Waistline needs to be measured for clothes size determination and health evaluation, but the instructions to do it are vague: keep the stomach neutral, neither sucked in nor bulged out, hold the measuring tape not too loosely nor too tight. A person’s waist expands and contracts with the breath, so at which point of the breath cycle should the measurement be taken? How much tension should the measuring tape have?

Averaging several measurements would be more accurate than a single vaguely defined one, both in the sense of replication across different measurers and in the sense of corresponding to the physical quantity of interest (health status, tightness of the clothes). One simple way is to average the measured perimeter of a maximally sucked-in gut and a maximally pushed-out gut.

A better measure, but quite difficult to take, is to average the waist circumference across the whole cycle of breathing in and out, for several cycles. A device to do this would be a loop of flexible measuring tape pulled into a roll by a spring, similarly to a construction measuring tape made of metal. The roll would contain electronics which continuously record how much tape is in the roll, therefore the length of the loop outside the roll. The length data could be averaged to obtain the average waistline.

A more modern method is to use two cameras pointed at the person from two sides at waist height, recording a 3D video of the waist over the breath cycle. The video could then be averaged on a computer to find the mean volume. Whole-body volume could be determined similarly – no need for Archimedes’ Eureka method of submerging the body in a bathtub with a volume scale on it. The volume and the weight determine the density of the body, which gives partial information about its fat percentage.