Basal Metabolic Rate Calculator

The Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) Calculator will take the user inputs gender, weight, height and age in order to compute an estimated of the BMR in calories per day.

An illustration is shown below:

The application makes use of the following widgets:

• Radio Buttons
  • gender
  • weight/height units
• Numeric Input
  • weight/height values
• Submit Button

The calculation is done by implementing the following formulae in server.R:

• Imperial Units

  • Women: BMR = 655 + ( 4.35 x weight in pounds ) + ( 4.7 x height in inches ) - ( 4.7 x age in years )
  • Men: BMR = 66 + ( 6.23 x weight in pounds ) + ( 12.7 x height in inches ) - ( 6.8 x age in year )

• Metric Units

  • Women: BMR = 655 + ( 9.6 x weight in kilos ) + ( 1.8 x height in cm ) - ( 4.7 x age in years )
  • Men: BMR = 66 + ( 13.7 x weight in kilos ) + ( 5 x height in cm ) - ( 6.8 x age in years )

The formulae were obtained here.

A future version of the application may use an action button instead of a submit button.

• This could allow us to forego the initial calculation of the BMR based on the default values.
• The calculation would only be performed on the first and subsequent presses of the action button.