Malaysian Journal of Public Health Medicine 2016, Special Volume (1): 22-25 ORIGINAL ARTICLE ANTHROPOMETRICS EVALUATION OF CHILDREN BETWEEN GENDERS Hanani YUHANIZ 1 , Asnawi SERAILA 1 , Siti Rafedah ABDUL KARIM 1 , Suhaimi MUHAMMED 1 , Abdul Hamid SALEH 2 1 School of Industrial Technology, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia 2 Forest Products Division, Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM), Malaysia ABSTRACT In developing ergonomically sound furniture, there is a need in evaluating anthropometrics from various aspect such as gender differences. The objectives of this study was to evaluate anthropometrics differences between genders of children in Malaysia in order to determine the need in having specified chairs for each gender. Represented by four states in Malaysia, a total of 2400 children were involved in the study. A custom made measurer and an anthropometer were used to measure the subjects. Six body measurements, which are, sitting shoulder height, sitting subscapular height, shoulder breadth, buttock popliteal length, popliteal height and hip width were documented for evaluation. From this study, there were some significant differences on some body parts while other body parts were similar to male and female. Therefore, chairs are needed to be made according to the suitability of both gender. Keywords: anthropometrics, ergonomics, children, gender INTRODUCTION The development of anthropometrics in ergonomics is undeniably an important part to be included. Ergonomics, which means the scientific discipline concerned with understanding of the interactions among humans and other elements of a system, (Dul & Weerdmeester, 2008) comprises many aspects to consider when developing standardized ergonomic products. Anthropometrics which means body measurements are the based when designing ergonomic products. However, there are many issues in getting anthropometrics data to be applied in designs. These include lack of anthropometrics data, lack of specific measurements for singled sizes products (Bhattacharya & McGlothlin, 2012), not up-to- date data (Castellucci, Arezes, Molenbroek, & Viviani, 2015) and also differential issues as in ethnicity, provinces and gender (Panagiotopoulou, Christoulas, Papanckolaou, & Mandroukas, 2004). Children growth rates differ from male and female due to the hormonal changes which females are being known to have faster growth rate than that of male during childhood. Since children’s body parts are not fully developed, therefore it is harder to propose dimensions for product design. Furthermore, according to Jeong and Park (1990), there was a significant results on an observation regarding sexual differences which showed boys needed higher desk and chairs, however girls seems to need larger chair depths and widths (Oyewole, Haight, & Freivalds, 2010). These studies proves that the evaluation of gender needs to be done in order to propose dimensions for ergonomic product design. Therefore, in this study, the objective was to evaluate the gender differences between the male and female children. In performing this study, the ability to propose accurate anthropometrics data for product design may be achieved. METHODS In order to obtain anthropometrics data for Peninsular Malaysia, a multi-stage sampling was performed. Three steps were taken in this sampling method in order to obtain the final sampling amount. The steps were shown in figure 1 where 3 stages of multi-stage sampling was made. Furthermore, samples were calculated based on a rule of thumb by Roscoe (1975), stated that a minimum number of 30 for each classification is sufficient (Sekaran & Bougie, 2009).