Figure: Pressure transducer accurate without calibration
The ability to rapidly and reliably assess pressure applied to a tissue is critical to many medical situations. Dr. Nancy Paris’s lab realized that many traditional instruments do not measure the actual pressure applied to tissue because they do not account for the compliance characteristics and constantly need to be recalibrated which has led to inefficient and ineffective medical treatment, and her lab aims to correct this issue.
Measuring the interface pressure between a biomedical system and the human body is imperative for enhancing efficiency and safety during the creation of biomedical devices. This paper outlines how transducers are only truly effective in an environment where it has been optimized for specific device-tissue compliance combinations. Her research is helping bridge the gap of using transducers to quantitatively measure pressure without the need to calibrate it to different conditions when the tissue can redirect the force lines to be non-perpendicular to the transducer.
N. J. Paris-Seeley, J. A. McEwen, D. P. Romilly, A compliance independent pressure transducer for biomedical device-tissue interfaces, Biomedical Instrumentation and Technology, 2000, 34(6), 423-431