Development and evaluation of a compliance-independent pressure transducer for biomedical applications

The measurement of pressure at a device/tissue interface is desirable in many biomedical engineering applications such as tourniquets and mammography in order to optimize the design or performance of the device. Testing of a selection of existing interface transducers has demonstrated that many are dependent on device and tissue compliance. Such a transducer is only useful in an application where it has been calibrated for specific device/tissue compliance combinations. To overcome this limitation the authors have developed an interface pressure transducer whose output signal is not affected by changes in interface compliance. This enables the transducer to quantitatively measure pressure in many applications without the need to calibrate the transducer for varying compliance conditions. The signal from such a transducer could be incorporated into a control system to measure and control the pressure applied by a mammography machine to the breast.