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Abstract
Knowledge about the human skin mechanical properties is essential in several domains,
particularly for dermatology, cosmetic or to detect some cutaneous pathology. This
study proposes a new method to determine the human skin mechanical properties in vivo
using the indentation test. Usually, the skin mechanical parameters obtained with
this method are influenced by the mechanical properties of the subcutaneous layers,
like muscles. In this study, different mechanical models were used to evaluate the
effect of the subcutaneous layers on the measurements and to extract the skin elastic
properties from the global mechanical response. The obtained results demonstrate that
it is necessary to take into account the effect of the subcutaneous layers to correctly
estimate the skin Young's modulus. Moreover, the results illustrate that the variation
of the measured Young's modulus at low penetration depth cannot be correctly described
with usual one-layer mechanical models. Thus a two-layer elastic model was proposed,
which highly improved the measurement of the skin mechanical properties.