Introduce the Concept of Acupuncture Point-location Methods into Estimating Body Dimensions

摘要

The procedures for collecting anthropometric data are usually complicated and costly in terms of resources such as workforce, time, and money. According to previous experiences and surveys among designers and engineers, most practitioners do not know how the old anthropometric data may be converted into applicable new ones when updated data is unavailable (Wang et al., 1999). Therefore, it is indeed a significant undertaking to develop methods that can easily convert old data into new ones easily and minimize the errors. A commonly used technique for getting a specific body dimension is to measure the stature and multiply it by the given ratio to the stature. However, many of the data calculated with this method appear inconsistent for different groups of people (Park et al., 1999; Lin et al., 2004), indicating that stature may not be a good reference body dimension. Therefore, this study aimed at looking for a “better” reference body dimension for estimating body dimensions. By being “better”, it means that it should be more accurate, more consistent, and easily usable by designers and engineers. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the finger cun (i.e., the width of the patient's finger taken as a unit of measurement, F-cun in brief; cun pronounced as tsuen) is defined from the dimensions of the patient's digits and body areas. It is a relative measurement specific to each patient. To correct the limitations of current body dimension estimation methods (BDE methods), this study proposed introducing F-cun and B-cun into estimating body dimensions. In addition, to verify the proposal, this study recruited 10 subjects as samplings and calculated their ratios of B-cun to F-cun. After hypothesis tests, seven of twenty-one ratios are available now.