Practical Considerations of Applying Body Scanning as a Teaching and Research Tool

Used in specific ways, body scanning technology can provide greater understanding of the body and its relationship to clothing. However, body scanning is still a developing technology and little is known about the practical applications and limitations of its operation within the education environment. Further to this, whilst there have been many high profile body scanning surveys, there still appears to be little accessible information on the practical issues of body scanning or data derived from scanning. With reference to live industry and academic projects, and the application of this technology within a UK university, recommendations are provided in the following areas: supporting structures and methods to enable; long term research, short term; accruing of data that can be seen as comparable to that collected in other locations and by other teams. Importantly processes and data captured during scanner use have little standardisation and each operator is expected to develop their own structures for training, data collection, assessment, storage and application. This can be extremely difficult without accessible examples of structures and processes previously applied. The team operating this scanner have found a diverse number of uses and developed protocols for ethics and storage that ensure data collected can have long term relevance as a resource in the increasing global arena of big data and collaboration anticipated by existing funding sources. Fundamentally, recommendations are made regarding body scanner supplier interventions that would enable the easier application of this technology and ensure data is comparable and has the greatest value for each and all operators. It is hoped through the adoption and provision of resources to support consistent scanning and data storage the current data collected on a small scale by varied users can have the greatest opportunity for future use collaboratively across different user groups.