• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.919-922
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• 2005

Generally, we take a bath to obtain a clean body as well as a good health. Human body generates various physical and emotional changes by stimulations of therapeutic effect of heat and hydraulic pressures. Accordingly, we can obtain not only relaxations but also effects of hydrotherapy. The survey of bathing/showering behaviors and therapeutic effect of heat reactions present elementary data for development of a bathing/showering system. However, there are few existing data for bathing/showering behaviors and effects. Consequently, surveys were performed to know patterns of bathing and showering, and relations between physiological changes and water temperature were examined by partial bathing on human body in this study.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.256-259
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• 2005

Analysis of behavior pattern and thermal response during bathing and showering provides important fundamental data when developing an automatic bathing/showering system. The behavior pattern and physiological changes during bathing/showering were measured und analyzed for the aged male group. We recorded the volunteers showering at front, back, left and right view using four CCTV cameras in order to study the behavior pattern during showering. The photographic data were analyzed by counting the frequencies of body contact and identifying zones where hands could reach. In order to study the thermal response, we measured the blood pressure (B.P), heart rate (H.R), body temperature (B.T.), breathing rate (B.R) for the different water temperatures and the locations of immersion for the young and old age groups. The results showed that the frequencies of body contacts were varied for different body sections. Also there were some body sections where hands could not be reached because of reduced pliability and muscular strength of the aged group. But we observed rather uniform body contact frequencies when a towel was used. In partial immersion bath experiments, we observed the changes of B.P. H.R and B.T in the case of young and old age groups, and the changes were more significant in the young age group.