Monitoring children’s growth is an important component of research and programs of public health. SECA electronic balance although the most recommended method of weight measurement, in community based studies is expensive to begin with; it gets easily affected by child’s movements or cry making weighing difficult. Moreover, need for electricity and marked voltage fluctuations hampering its precision, further, prevents its use. Field trial involves extensive traveling on jerky roads, in our experience a scale does not last more than 1 year of use under these conditions. There is a need for alternatives which can be used for community based trials.

We evaluated whether the modified and adopted spring balance recommended by WHO which is cheaper and less maintenance intensive alternative for weight measurement in preschool children, performed as well as the sophisticated SECA electronic balance for monitoring the growth of children in a developing country community based clinical trial setting. Within context of a randomized clinical trial of zinc supplementation, a total of 2281 children 5-36 months of age, were weighed using both spring balance which was modified by marking a 50 g graduation (Model MP 25; 25kg × 100g; CMS weighing equipment Ltd.; made in England) and a SECA electronic scale (SECA Model 727; 20 × 10g; made in Germany). They were weighed first by a team of field workers, followed by the supervisor’s team who were blinded to each other’s weights. Thus, two measurements were recorded for each child. Prior to the study these health workers were trained for a week achieving 95% intra and inter observer agreement.

There were no significant differences between the mean weights of the children using two different methods of weighing (Table I), and showed a high correlation (r= 0.99). To conclude, in field conditions where SECA scales are difficult to maintain, there is no electricity, walking distances are more or electronic scales are not available, spring balance with a little modification could provide a good alternative in taking the weight of children aged 5 months to 36 months. For clinical trials or investigations which need to weigh preschool children older than 6 months in developing country settings, spring balance can be used without loss of precision. Also, spring balance is cheaper and more convenient with higher uptime and less requirement for maintenance.

Funding: WHO, Thrasher Research Fund, US-AID Cooperative agreement and NIH.R29HD34724.