Valenza, A., Rykaczewski, K., Martinez, D.M. et al. (4 more authors) (2023) Thermal modulation of skin friction at the finger pad. Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, 146. 106072. ISSN 1751-6161
Abstract
Preliminary human studies show that reduced skin temperature minimises the risk of mechanically induced skin damage. However, the mechanisms by which cooling enhances skin tolerance to pressure and shear remain poorly understood. We hypothesized that skin cooling below thermo-neutral conditions will decrease kinetic friction at the skin-material interface. To test our hypothesis, we measured the friction coefficient of a thermally pre-conditioned index finger pad sliding at a normal load (5N) across a plate maintained at three different temperatures (38, 24, and 16 °C) in 8 healthy young adults (29±5y). To quantify the temperature distribution of the skin tissue, we used 3D surface scanning and Optical Coherence Tomography to develop an anatomically representative thermal model of the finger. Our group-level data indicated that the sliding finger with thermally affected tissues (up to 8 mm depth) experienced significantly lower frictional forces (p<0.01) at plate temperatures of 16 °C (i.e. 32% decrease) and 24 °C (i.e. 13% decrease) than at 38 °C, respectively. This phenomenon occurred consistently across participants (i.e. N = 6/8, 75%) and without large changes in skin hydration during sliding. Our complementary experimental and theoretical results provide new insights into thermal modulation of skin friction that can be employed for developing thermal technologies to maintain skin integrity under mechanical loading and shearing.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Skin temperature, Friction, Pressure ulcer, Optical coherence tomography, Computational modelling, Biophysics |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Biomedical Sciences (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 07 Oct 2024 10:14 |
Last Modified: | 07 Oct 2024 10:14 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.jmbbm.2023.106072 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:217985 |