Allocating protective clothing to personnel of emergency service organisations requires a substantial amount of time and effort. This makes these processes costly and laborious. Data-driven outfitting bears the potential to increase efficiency both economically and ecologically. Therefore, this study explores a smartphone application’s feasibility to enable virtual human-product matchmaking within the context of organisational outfitting procedures. This is achieved by testing the application’s ability to capture individual body data of users and associate these with product dimensions. The application’s performance is evaluated by contrasting the accuracy of its results with those of a laser-based 3D body scanner as well as through physical inspection of results. For this purpose, an experiment has been conducted in which 63 members of the German Armed Forces were given the task to scan themselves via a smartphone application. Obtained information was transferred to a mock-up online shop where a pretrained algorithm automatically matched various body dimensions to the optimal sizes of ten different clothing products. Thereafter, participants were given the selected products for physical trial fitting. The fit of each solitary product and the products' combinability were subjectively evaluated by the participants and objectively by a clothing technician and a tailor. Findings show that the smartphone application is feasible to enable the outfitting procedure's digitisation, although body data captured by the smartphone application was of lower accuracy than data gathered by the laser-based 3D body scanner. Furthermore, the experiment's findings helped to uncover issues of incumbent product dimensions and size ranges as well as substantiated the importance of gender-specific clothing since the usage of unisex products led to poor results for the female subpopulation. For the male subpopulation, 86 per cent of products were optimally allocated, the wrong size was chosen in 12 per cent of cases, and in two per cent of cases the system failed to select any product at all. By analysing these aspects, the findings shed more light on technical issues such as measuring errors or flaws of the allocation algorithm. The study evinces current potentials and troubles of both the smartphone application and the digital outfitting system which offer avenues for future research. Insights into the potential of smartphone applications are valuable for all organisations that face the issue of economic and ecological inefficiencies of human-product matchmaking regardless if they operate in an intraorganisational, a business-to-business, or a business-to-customer context. This was an early approach to employ smartphone-based technology in intraorganisational product-human matchmaking procedures for protective clothing. Although improvements are still possible from a technical point of view, the findings suggest that smartphone-based body scanning will have a key impact on industry.     «

Allocating protective clothing to personnel of emergency service organisations requires a substantial amount of time and effort. This makes these processes costly and laborious. Data-driven outfitting bears the potential to increase efficiency both economically and ecologically. Therefore, this study explores a smartphone application’s feasibility to enable virtual human-product matchmaking within the context of organisational outfitting procedures. This is achieved by testing the application’s...    »