Development of a system for collecting and maintaining anthropometric measurements for persons with dwarfism

Every product or environment a person encounters should match their capabilities and limitations to maximize safety and efficiency, but the variety present in the human race makes a design which accommodates everyone difficult to achieve. It is especially difficult when the user population includes persons with dwarfism due to their extreme differences in body size and a vast lack of anthropometric information specific to dwarfs. To aid in achieving ergonomic design for little people, an anthropometric survey was performed using photographic methods on forty-nine little people. The analysis of the results showed that the dimensions were generally normally distributed and variation was greatly reduced when the subject population was limited to a single type of dwarfism. The data were used to create models based on highly correlated measurement pairs so that body measurements could be estimated as a proportion of total height when anthropometric data were not available. Finally, recommendations were made on how to improve on the anthropometric survey method and a database for maintaining current and future measurement data was proposed.