Dr Robinette is an award-winning anthropology researcher and Fellow of the US Air Force Research Laboratory at Dayton, Ohio.
She is also an international pioneer and technology leader in human anthropometrics.
This branch of anthropology focuses on comparative measurements of the human body and its parts.
She yesterday gave a keynote talk titled "Who is Average?" during a University of Otago Consumer and Applied Science centenary conference held at the university, and also discussed the issues in an interview.
For decades, people had been asking for "the average man, woman, foot, hand, head" to help with the design of products such as clothing, but what was really required was "good fit and function".
In fact, a researcher, Gilbert Daniels, had, nearly 60 years ago, in 1952, demonstrated "that the average man does not exist".
People could be average in some respects, such as in overall height, but no-one was average in every way, including their weight and all their relative body proportions.
In the apparel industry it was "common practice" to hire someone to be a "fit" model for a product line's base size, with the products designed around and tested by the model.
Other sizes were scaled up and down from the base size using rules of thumb called "grade rules".
Accordingly, the particular person selected had a "critical impact on the success or failure of the product line".
But "up to now" the main selection method had been "trial and error guesswork with lots of money wasted on poor guesses", rather than using a sound statistical approach.
Apparel companies were starting to use data from body measurement surveys, but progress in utilising the latest scientific research was still too slow.
Certain garment sizes were duplicated across clothing ranges intended for different clients, including children and small women, but, by contrast, little was provided for many people with other body shapes, such as a "curvy" or pear-shaped appearance.
During the past 30 years, big improvements had been made in the US armed forces in better matching garment sizes and body shapes. A study of about 1000 navy women and their uniform clothing she had led in the 1980s had found that, initially, only 25% of the existing sizes fitted without having to make costly alterations.
The fitting had subsequently been improved to 99%, resulting in significant savings.
US forces had benefited from the use of modern, three-dimensional body mapping techniques and the use of sound statistical and engineering principles to improve the matching of body shapes and both uniform sizes and aircraft cockpit design.
"It really dramatically improves our ability to understand human variability," she said.
