Dermatologists as well as the cosmetical industry are interested in evaluating the mechanical properties of human skin. Many devices have been developed to measure skin's response to mechanical stress. In the pres...
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ISBN:
(纸本)0819441864
Dermatologists as well as the cosmetical industry are interested in evaluating the mechanical properties of human skin. Many devices have been developed to measure skin's response to mechanical stress. In the presented paper a new approach to quantify the viscoelastic behavior of human skin on mechanical stress is proposed. Image processing techniques are used to detect the two-dimensional deformation of the skin in uniaxial tensile tests. The apparatus consists of a computer-controlled stepper motor drive mechanism to extend the skin, a load cell to measure the force exerted on the skin and an optical image processing system to observe the test area. To get the strain state, displacement vector fields are calculated by a method based on local template matching and interpolation algorithms. From the displacement vector fields a strain tensor and the principal strain directions are evaluated. A model built up of springs and dashpots, is used to characterize the stress-strain-time relationships of skin and to obtain a set of parameters, which represent the instantaneous elasticity, the delayed elasticity and the viscosity of skin on loading. The results show the accuracy of the model. The method seems to be useful to investigate the influences of age, test area, cosmetics, etc. on the mechanical properties of human skin in vivo.
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