Design and fabrication of an instrument to evaluate characteristics of fluid handling capacity of wound care dressings

169-176A novel instrument has been developed to determine the fluid handling capacity of different types of wound dressings, irrespective of their structure and composition. The instrument is developed with custom built wound bed/plate with specially designed path to control the amount and flow rate of wound exudates, simulating the actual wound alike conditions. The instrument has provision to apply compression / pressure over wound dressing while testing to similar realtime compression / pressure applied on wound dressing. The study was carried out using different types of commercially available wound dressings. It is found that the developed instrument is able to test different types of dressings effectively for fluid handling capacity. The results obtained by new instrument are found comparable with the existing methods. The existing methods give only single value of fluid handling capacity at the defined hour as compared to the new instrument which gives online continuous results from zero to 48 h. This real time data may be useful for defining the effectiveness of dressings at a particular time interval. The data obtained from the instrument can also be used to know the saturation point and change with time for a particular dressing. The repeatability of results are also proven. Also the instrument is able to test fluid handling capacity of dressings with and without pressure