Feasibility of using optical coherence tomography to study the influence of skin structure on finger friction

This paper presents work using an in vivo technique, optical coherence tomography (OCT), to investigate the structure of human finger pad skin and the influences of some related parameters on skin friction, such as contact area, deformation and hydration. The experimental results show that there was no significant relationship between the thickness of the stratum corneum (SC) and the friction coefficient as well as the number of sweat ducts (SD). The real contact length was found to increase with increasing the applied normal force following the power law of A ∝ W a . The study of hydration found an increasing linear relationship between the SC moisture and the friction coefficient (up to 72 au).