• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2010.05a
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• pp.1381-1382
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• 2010

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.875-887
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• 2010

The quantitative effectiveness of powered support surfaces such as APAM in preventing and treating pressure ulcers has not been sufficiently evaluated because of uncertainty of alternating pressure load input and lack of interpretation of dynamic perfusion characteristics of soft tissue. The aim was to verify the dynamic loading effects to sacral tissue perfusion characteristics from alternating set pressure changes. We developed integrated experiment system to supply alternating load to supinely positioned sacrum and concurrently measured $TcPO_2$, $TcPCO_2$ and air cell pressure. Ten aged subjects (5 female, 5 male) were tested with alternating set pressure 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60mmHg. From the dynamic perfusion response eight characteristic parameters were proposed such as average, minimum, maximum and perfusion range regarding to $TcPO_2$ and $TcPCO_2$. A one-way ANOVA was carried out to determine whether the manipulation of alternating set pressure had any effect on $TcPO_2$ and $TcPCO_2$. From the dynamic tissue perfusion response we found mean $TcPO_2$ decreased exponentially as alternating pressure load increased and perfusion range varied mainly because of minimum level change of $TcPO_2$. And perfusion range of $TcPCO_2$ affected by increase of maximum value of $TcPCO_2$. From the results we can get more strict insights about actual physiological dynamic tissue perfusion mechanism under alternating pressure load.