In vivo quantitative evaluation of skin ageing by capacitance image analysis

The skin care reveals of great importance for matters of both aesthetics and health. Often, the skin appearance gives us information about the skin health status as well as hints at the age of a person. However, it has always been difficult to give a measure of the skin health status as well as of the human aging process by simply analyzing the skin surface appearance. This could help dermatologists as well as cosmetic scientists to evaluate the effectiveness of medical or cosmetic treatments. So far, no in vivo measurements regarding skin topography features have been achieved to evaluate routinely skin ageing by a portable device. This work describes how a portable capacitive device could be utilized to achieve measures of skin ageing in vivo and routinely. The capacitive images give a high resolution representation of skin topography, in terms of wrinkles and cells: in this work we have addressed the former. Accurate experiments accomplished on 90 subjects show how the feature we conceived is linearly related to skin ageing.