Anthropometric Survey Participant

  • Rosella, Tony (PI)

Project: Consultancy

Project Details

Description

The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) is a business facilitator in Europe, removing trade barriers for European industry and consumers. Its mission is to foster the European economy in global trading, the welfare of European citizens and the environment. Through its services it provides a platform for the development of European Standards and other technical specifications. CEN's National Members are the National Standardization Bodies (NSBs), which work together to develop voluntary European Standards (ENs), together with the CEN CENELEC Management Center (CCMC). For an overview of the CEN members see the CEN website .

In the past several years, CEN received from the European Commission a number of mandates for standardization projects related to childcare articles, toys and other products destined for or used by children. Experts involved in the works of several CEN Technical Committees (CEN / TC) related to children have identified and emphasized the need of having precise and relevant requirements corresponding to the real use of the products that they are standardizing. For this purpose, the use of correct and up-to-date anthropometric data is of great importance.

Availability of correct anthropometric data is essential to define appropriate (safety) requirements such as probes, openings, loads, accessibility etc. in order to avoid / reduce entrapment, strangulation risks etc. The use of incorrect or out-of-date data may cause the (safety) requirements not to cover all children to whom they are destined. Furthermore, experience and knowledge of the anthropometric experts and manufacturers show that values ​​for body measures and physical strength of children have remarkably changed in the past 30 years and no European-wide collection of data has been recently conducted to fill this gap. Additionally, due to lack of a single source of up-to-date and confirmed data, different technical bodies in the European Standardization system have been developing their own approaches to defining the safety requirements to address risks posed to children. This has led to a fragmentation of the requirements which might cause confusion to consumers, manufacturers and market surveillance authorities.

The existing horizontal CEN / ISO technical report CEN ISO / TR 7250-2 provides “Statistical summaries of body measurements from individual ISO populations”. The technical report, however, only covers four European countries (Austria, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands) and as the body dimensions of people have been increasing in many countries over the last decades some of the information contained might already be outdated. Furthermore, it only contains information for working age people and for children there is no such document available. For this reason it is necessary to acquire anthropometric data of children and to provide the stakeholders, in particular industry, with this information, eg in a CEN technical report.

For this reason, CEN carries out, within CEN / TC 122 “Ergonomics” and in particular CEN / TC 122 / WG 1 “Anthropometry”, a project to acquire anthropometric data of children and to provide the stakeholders, in particular industry and CEN technical committees, with this information, ie in a CEN technical report. In addition, a CEN technical report on the correct application of anthropometric and strength data will be developed. DIN, the national standards body for Germany, provides the secretariat of both, CEN / TC 122 and CEN / TC 122 / WG 1, and performs the administrative management of the standardization work.

Layman's description

An anthropometric survey of children in order to standardise data for use in products that children wear, use and interact with across multiple industries.

Key findings

acquisition of necessary available anthropometric and strength data of children in Europe;
development of programs for the measurement of anthropometric and strength data of children in Europe in consultation with the stakeholders;
supplementary measurement of required anthropometric data to complement the existing data;
supplementary measurement of required strength data to complement the existing data;
practical evaluation of existing and actualized databases;
elaboration of guidelines on how to correctly apply anthropometric and strength data of children, eg when writing a standard or designing a product;
publication of CEN technical report (s) on anthropometric and strength data of children in Europe and on the correct application of this data.
Short titleAnthropometric Survey Participant
AcronymASP
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date3/07/2331/12/24

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