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Development of an Automated Pressure Sensitive Thermesthesiometer and Its Application in Characterizing the Thermal Response of Human Tissue with Respect to Warm Surfaces

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Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 592))

Abstract

An advanced thermesthesiometer has been developed to measure the heat flux, touch-force, and internal temperature profile of a simulated body part coming into contact with a warm surface. A suitably chosen material with properties resembling those of human tissue is used for bare skin simulation and is thermally regulated using a programmable logic controller (PLC). An automated driving mechanism provides variable touch-occurrences and pressures over specially engineered test-surfaces with varying effusivities and surface roughness. Each test-surface is thermally regulated at a specific temperature to aid in quantifying prior research on human subject testing and pain threshold measurements. This study not only emphasizes the instrument design but also demonstrates its potential use in human-subjective feedback testing with respect to steady state and transient heat transfer processes.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Intel, Mark Macdonald, Mondira Pant, and Wu Yuen Shing for useful discussions. This work was supported by a grant from Intel and performed at Cornell University.

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Correspondence to Paul Soldate .

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Soldate, P., Fan, J. (2018). Development of an Automated Pressure Sensitive Thermesthesiometer and Its Application in Characterizing the Thermal Response of Human Tissue with Respect to Warm Surfaces. In: Nunes, I. (eds) Advances in Human Factors and Systems Interaction. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 592. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60366-7_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60366-7_36

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-60365-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60366-7

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