Prakash Per­sad

When is body scan­ning ac­cept­able? For air­port se­cu­ri­ty screen­ing, maybe not; for fa­cil­i­tat­ing on­line shop­ping, yes?In the quest to make air­ports and flights safe for the trav­el­ling pub­lic while re­duc­ing the time spent in se­cu­ri­ty queues, body scan­ning tech­nol­o­gy was in­tro­duced to as­sist in de­tect­ing threats that were be­ing hid­den un­der or with­in cloth­ing. One such tech­nol­o­gy is wave mil­lime­tre imag­ing. So ex­act­ly what is this?

It is mi­crowave tech­nol­o­gy used in ra­dio broad­cast­ing and cell­phone trans­mis­sions. It is thus not a new tech­nol­o­gy but rather a well-known one, be­ing ap­plied in a new area, se­cu­ri­ty, in a nov­el way. The mi­crowaves are in the one to ten mil­lime­tre range and are emit­ted by ro­tat­ing trans­mit­ters.

They pass through cloth­ing and up­on strik­ing skin or con­cealed weapons and ex­plo­sives, are re­flect­ed back to­wards re­ceivers and are con­vert­ed in­to im­ages to be viewed by the se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers. Weapons, both met­al and non-met­al, can thus be de­tect­ed.

The 3-D im­ages pro­duced by this tech­nol­o­gy can be quite graph­ic as the con­tours of the body are ob­tained from the mi­crowave re­flec­tions. Many peo­ple are un­com­fort­able with the idea that to­tal strangers can view them "naked" and the in­va­sion of pri­va­cy con­cerns nat­u­ral­ly come to the fore. This con­cern was ad­dressed by us­ing soft­ware to re­duce the de­tails of the im­agery by ren­der­ing it to a gener­ic out­line. Pri­va­cy con­cerns still linger and use of the tech­nol­o­gy is be­ing re­viewed in some coun­tries.

The fact that a dig­i­tal pro­to­type of the body was pro­duced meant that body mea­sure­ments could be eas­i­ly ob­tained by scan­ning with po­ten­tial ap­pli­ca­tions in both on­line shop­ping for clothes and for col­lect­ing and im­prov­ing the an­thro­po­met­ric (body mea­sure­ment) da­ta used to size cloth­ing.

Cloth­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers use da­ta tak­en from sam­ple pop­u­la­tions. Cap­tur­ing these sets of da­ta is very time con­sum­ing and ex­pen­sive. Fur­ther, the da­ta is not re­flec­tive of all pop­u­la­tions. It is a well-known fact that body mea­sure­ments are not stan­dard world­wide.

Many years ago, an en­gi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor at UWI pro­posed a project for ob­tain­ing rear end mea­sure­ments to pro­duce Trinidad-spe­cif­ic da­ta that could be used in the de­sign of chairs and pos­si­bly pants. It was re­ceived with much amuse­ment and no small amount of aca­d­e­m­ic re­buff. It was and still is fash­ion­able to use US-dat­ed da­ta.

At Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, the Col­lege of Hu­man Ecol­o­gy is in­volved in a study to col­lect body-scanned da­ta that could be used to re­view the mea­sure­ments as­cribed to the var­i­ous sizes. This would help cloth­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers pro­duce bet­ter fit­ting clothes and thus boost their busi­ness­es.

On­line shop­ping has be­come rou­tine for books, mu­sic and ap­pli­ances. One area that has lagged, how­ev­er, is the cloth­ing sec­tor, as peo­ple pre­fer to see how the clothes look on them–re­al clothes on re­al peo­ple. But if there is a dig­i­tal avatar of you avail­able to the store, then you would al­so be able to see how the fash­ion suits you, in cy­ber space though, while sit­ting in front of your com­put­er or with a smart phone any­where. On­line cloth­ing re­tail­ers are bank­ing on this tech­nol­o­gy to im­prove their e-busi­ness.

To fa­cil­i­tate and grow this, body scan­ners have been in­stalled in some malls and stores in the US where shop­pers can avail them­selves of free body scans. Rec­om­men­da­tions are then of­fered based on the scanned mea­sure­ments. Oth­er com­pa­nies are of­fer­ing body scan­ners for the home.

These are based on elec­tron­ic gam­ing de­vices that quite pop­u­lar with chil­dren and adults alike. So in the pri­va­cy and com­fort of one's home, a per­son can ob­tain and digi­tise their body mea­sure­ments and then pro­ceed on­line with this da­ta to dig­i­tal­ly try out the clothes be­fore buy­ing.