The Development of Physical Skin Model for Biomechanical Applications

Abstract

The skin, which is known as a complex multi-layered tissue, is vital for protecting the body from potentially harmful external environment and exhibits complex mechanical behaviour. As reported, skin is a non-linear, anisotropic and viscoelastic materials, with its mechanical properties varied in each skin layer and influenced mainly by skin hydration status, environment humidity and test conditions. Therefore, it is difficult to study the mechanical and tribological interactions between human skin and materials for the development of human contacting products. And in order to better understand the mechanical interactions between human skin and various products for optimizing surfaces and materials in contact with human skin, it is significant to use instrumental mechanical and tribological measurements, which could provide objective and more reproducible results without inter-and intra-subject variations. Past decades we have witnessed many endeavors exerted for developing physical skin model to objectively study the interactions between human skin and materials, instead of using in vivo or ex vivo human skin or animal skin. This review article gives an overview of the development of physical skin model for biomechanical applications, in which the progresses made in the synthesis and the following tests of skin-materials interaction were summarised and discussed.

A Comprehensive Review: Interaction of Appearance and Behavior, Artificial Skin, and Humanoid Robot

“…Moreover, e-skins are applied to robots both in life and in the industry to ensure safety for people when communicating with robots. Moreover, studies on materials to make human skin were also carried out [70,71] to create a realistic feeling like human skin. Tese studies need to be connected to creating artifcial skins for robots that look and feel like human skin.…”

Real-Time Actuation of a Dielectric Elastomer Actuator Neuroprosthesis for Facial Paralysis

“…The silicone membrane is used as a surrogate for human skin due to its similar mechanical properties. Along with other synthetic polymers such as gelatinous substances, silicone is one of the most commonly used materials for physical skin models [26]. This setup is illustrated in Fig.…”

Water lubrication of graphene oxide-based materials

“…Bio-lubrication uses lubrication theory and methods for friction pairs in biological systems. It studies the tribological problems of biological systems or external surfaces of biological systems including the friction between human body replacement joints and biological tissues [120][121][122], the adhesion of blood on artificial implant [123,124], tooth wear [125][126][127], and skin friction [128,129].…”