Shared Resources

Shared Resources: Anthropometic head and face measurements

CAD of five different shapes and sizes of human heads

The response to the pandemic brought forward an amazing array of shared resources for product development teams. Many designers and engineers freely collaborated to address critical shortages of PPE.

In the public realm, some incredibly useful data recently pushed to the surface, and became more accessible to the product design community. In 2003, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) conducted a nationwide anthropometric survey of nearly 4,000 subjects, measuring the head and face to establish fit tests for respirator users.

In April, likely in response to the urgent need for PPE, the CDC updated their website with the research and 3D head data from this study. Soon after, the 3D data started popping up on GrabCAD and elsewhere, remixed for popular CAD modeling programs.

For industrial designers like us--who are often working on products that are worn on the head--these models offer an amazing resource to design the ergonomics virtually. With these heads in our toolkit, we can get much closer to excellent fit, comfort, and accurate placement of design elements with our first prototype.

If these would be useful for your team, you can download the data and models here:

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/data/datasets/rd-10130-2020-0/default.html