Relation between index finger width and hand width anthropometric measures

Measures of hand and finger anthropometry are very important for designing many hand held devices as well as understanding anthropometric effects on the operation of such devices. Many historical datasets have measured and recorded gross hand dimensions but do not often record the finer dimensions of the hand such as finger anthropometry. Knowing the size and mass of fingers across genders can be critical to the design and operation of hand held devices. In this paper we compare two empirical linear models that predicts index finger width at the proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joint (a finger anthropometric measure) based on hand-width (hand anthropometric measure). This will be especially useful for deriving population measures of finger anthropometry from large historical data sets where only gross hand dimensions are available.