ABSTRACT
The term “anthropometric topography” can be defined as the measurement and study of the configuration of human body surface, including its relief, features and structural relationships. The main differences between anthropometric topography and traditional anthropometry include: (1) Anthropometric topography emphasizes the measurement of body surface rather than pairs of landmarks (points); (2) features including not only dimensions are extracted from body surface measurement; (3) among the features, structural relationships, but not just value relationships, are a very important outcomes of the study, while traditional anthropometric measurement generally loses the information of structural relationships of dimensions. Thus, anthropometric topography can provide more useful information concerning the human body for ergonomic considerations in product design, occupational safety and health evaluation, human modeling and simulation, and so on. Among the content of anthropometric topography, dimensions, shape, and spatial distributions are mostly concerned with the context of ergonomics.
