Abstract
Makers of products that must accommodate anthropometric variability need to understand body size and shape of all people, including those who are obese. This is particularly important in safety critical applications such as medical devices and promoting the mobility of people with obesity in public spaces. To address the lack of data on this population segment we undertook a preliminary anthropometric study of individuals with high body mass index (BMI).
Several challenges, unique to this population segment, were encountered. 1. Measurement definitions/techniques needed, in some cases, to be altered to accommodate the larger size of the participant. 2. Definition of the boundaries of the sample (e.g., limiting by BMI or weight) is unknown, yet critical in determining the final statistics. 3. Issues of sample acquisition – how to obtain access to the population – materially affected the composition of the final sample. 4. The usual statistics used to report anthropometric data assume a generally normal distribution. In this case, the distribution is non-normal and affects the interpretation of the statistics.
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Bradtmiller, B., Wiggermann, N., Jones, M.L.H. (2019). Anthropometric Implications of the Global Obesity Epidemic. In: Bagnara, S., Tartaglia, R., Albolino, S., Alexander, T., Fujita, Y. (eds) Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018). IEA 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 826. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96065-4_51
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96065-4_51
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