• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2010.05a
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• pp.967-968
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• 2010

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.639-646
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• 2010

The APAM's quantitative effectiveness and comparative study in preventing and treating pressure ulcer has not been sufficiently evaluated mainly because of uncertainty of pressure load input and lack of interpretation of dynamic perfusion recovery characteristics of soft tissue. The purpose of this paper was to quantify and analyze the alternating pressure characteristics of APAM as a preventive measure for pressure ulcers. To quantify the alternating load to human body, we introduced alternating pressure profile concept and developed parametric model of the profile. Regarding pressure level and cycle time, 3 global and 7 local periodic parameters were used to define the profile such as light, standard, typical and heavy duty profile shape. Pressure impulse ratio of light duty is the lowest but pressure fluctuation is significantly high. For the same duty shape, contact conditions are changed with alternating cycle time and more dramatically in shorter alternating cycle time conditions. We can conclude that if we use shorter alternating cycle time on APAM's operation we can get more positive effects regarding to inflated contact time condition. We proposed the quantitative methods on tissue viability study of external loading by simultaneous measurement of interface pressure and tissue perfusion with proper alternating pressure profile conditions.