Abstract

Recently, skin diagnosis has been suggested as a promising tool for discrimination of Sasang Constitution, reported by examining the skin characteristics such as thickness, stiffness, slip, and skin textures like wrinkles and furrows. However, the works had a limitation in that clinical decision on the skin characteristics was made by relying upon oriental medicine doctors' subjective sense of touch. In order to objectify the skin diagnosis and claim its efficacy on the discrimination of the Sasang Constitutions, it is necessary to demonstrate its discrimination capability by providing numerical values in terms of physical quantities obtained from measurements using today's sensors and equipment technologies, which motivated this work as a priliminary step towards objectification of skin diagnosis. The skin characteristics focused in this work is the slip property of the back-hand skin that has been exploited using the dynamic friction measurement system. First, curved geometric effects of the back-hand skin on the measured lateral/vertical force signals were estimated using the artificially designed silicon coated structures, which led to a suggestion on a quality controlled experimental design based upon a empirical analysis model. Second, the experimental design thus suggested has been applied to the measurement of dynamic friction coefficients for two healthy male subjects of Taeumin (TE) and Soyangin (SY), respectively. The result shows that the dynamic friction coefficient is less for the SY subject than for the TE subject around the area of the skin used for diagnosis by the oriental medicine doctor, implying the TE subject's skin is more slippery than the SE subject's that is consistent with the oriental medicine doctor's diagnosis. Hopefully, this work can provide guidelines for obtaining quality data in friction measurement to be collected for discussion on the efficacy of the skin diagnosis and its objectification through statistical analysis.

Keywords

• Skin diagnosis;
• Slip;
• Friction;
• Dynamic friction coefficient;
• Objectification;
• Quality control;
• Empirical analysis;
• Sasang Constitution