New ISO 7250-3 – Body sizes for equipment design

ISO 7250-3, “Basic human body measurements for technological design – Part 3: Worldwide and regional design ranges for use in product standards,” has just been released.  It complements the previous two parts of ISO 7250 that are already in circulation.  It presents a unified anthropometric schema for worldwide product distribution as well as for regional distribution in both Europe and Asia. To do this it takes the more specific information presented in the ISO/TR 7250-2 and generalizes it as noted.

This concept of developing a kind of anthropometric baseline is valuable to folks in the automotive and aerospace industries, medical device manufacturers, and developers of other products that need to be tailored to the bodily dimensions of users.  So the first task of the ISO 7250 standards developers was to determine what measurements needed to be sampled.  This led to the release of ISO 7250-1, “Basic human body measurements for technological design — Part 1: Body measurement definitions and landmarks,” in 2008.

Next the actual statistics needed to be generated for various populations and so far this has been a country by country effort.  The ISO/TR 7250-2, “Basic human body measurements for technological design — Part 2: Statistical summaries of body measurements from national populations,” presents actual data from the following jurisdictions:  Austria, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Korea, the Netherlands, Thailand and the United States.  Some of the data is complete, that is all measurements from Part 1 are included, both for men and women.  Some is not.

Now the ISO 7250-3 completes the picture, using the specific data from the ISO/TR 7250-2 sources to present a more generalized range for worldwide averages, as well as for Europeans and Asians.  The tables that present this data are based on the schema of the Part 1.  They present you with each specific measurement as P1 (1st percentile) data, P5 (5th percentile) data, P95 (95th percentile) data and P99 (99th percentile) data.  There’s also a column for the midrange.  Annex A provides you with the same table structure, only using the European statistical information only.  Annex B is the same for the Asian region.

Data comes from a variety of sources.  For the U.S. information, the CAESAR database held by SAE International is used.  Information is included in this standard on various databases that are updated on a regular basis.  You may find that you end up using the source data and the same underlying process should you have a targeted population your product serves.

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Here’s a link directly to the order page for ISO 7250-3.  Want to talk with any of our staff members about the standard, the ISO 7250 series, or any other standards questions or requirements you might have?  Just contact us by phone (650-591-7600), fax (650-591-7617) or email (info@document-center.com).  We’re your Standards Experts!