Application of Principal Component Analysis: To provide a basis for the design of school furniture characterizing the anthropometry of students

Currently, in the Elementary Schools of Navojoa, Sonora, and in most of the states of the Mexican Republic, a mesabanco is used that is not designed according to the anthropometry of the students. Considering that students spend about 5 hours sitting down, factors such as fatigue, muscle-skeletal stress among others, can affect not only health but also school performance. In this book, the Principal Component Analysis technique is applied to support the design of school furniture in order to adjust it to statistical considerations based on the correlation observed in student anthropometry. To this end, a sample of 600 students from 1st to 6th grade was taken from the 50 urban primary schools in Navojoa, and a group of 24 variables was measured with anthropometric equipment. The final results show, on the one hand, that the furniture currently used by the primary level students is totally inadequate according to the identified anthropometric patterns, and on the other hand, it was possible to generate 6 different proposals of bench designs for the primary school student population.