Population Analysis: Communicating About Anthropometry in Context

Abstract

Providing accommodation to a widely varying user population presents a challenge to engineers and designers. It is often even difficult to quantify who is accommodated and who is not accommodated by designs, especially for equipment for which human-system integration is affected by multiple critical anthropometric dimensions. An approach to communicating levels of accommodation, hereby referred to as “population analysis,” applies existing human factors techniques in novel manners. This paper defines population analysis and discusses its major applications and case studies. The major applications of population analysis consist of providing accommodation information for multivariate problems and enhancing the value of feedback from human-in-the-loop testing. The results of these analyses range from the provision of specific accommodation percentages of the user population to recommendations of design specifications based on quantitative data. Such feedback is invaluable to designers and results in the design of products that accommodate the intended user population.