A proposed diffuse model to determine overweight and obesity in children and adolescents

Mexico is among the countries with the highest prevalence of overweight and obesity among children and adolescents. Therefore, an economical, rapid, reproducible and easy to implement technique that allows early detection in the school environment of overweight and obesity in children and adolescents is need. This paper presents a technique that meets these expectations based on a diffuse inference model with a set of 81 rules for the classification of body composition among 92 girls and 88 boys between the ages of 10 and 14 years. Weight, body mass index, fat mass percentage and the percentage of habitual weight were taken as attributes. For each attribute three diffuse sets were defined: normal, overweight and obese. To classify the value of the attribute, the most used references in the literature and those used by consulted nutritionists and pediatricians were used. As a result of the application of the diffuse model, an average accuracy of 97.6% was obtained with a 4.2% error for the corporal classification of girls and 93.4% with a 4.6% error for boys.