Programme 01 · Hardware
A non invasive skin sensor. It supplies the signal that everything else in the programme reads.
Why Hardware
Most skin AI reads photographs. A photograph encodes the camera, the lighting and the skin tone at least as strongly as it encodes the biology, and no amount of post processing removes a confound that was baked into the capture. Measuring the skin directly removes that category of error at the source. It is the harder path and it is the reason the rest of the programme can be honest about its accuracy.
What the sensor reads sits at the level of skin physiology rather than appearance: hydration, barrier function, sebum, elasticity.
Designed For Where It Has To Work
The sensor is designed for low cost manufacture, for operation without a specialist present, and for environments with intermittent connectivity. The constraint is not an afterthought for a later version. It is the specification.
In development. Not a medical device. Not cleared by any regulator.
What Barrier Function Is
The outermost layer of skin is built like a wall. Corneocytes are the bricks, flattened and overlapping. Between them sits an ordered lipid matrix, the lamellae, and that is the mortar. Water crossing out of the body has to go through the mortar, because it cannot go through the bricks. How much gets out, and how fast, is what barrier function means.
Water leaving through the lipid matrix
Schematic. Structures to scale in arrangement, not in size.
With the lamellae intact and ordered, water leaves slowly and in small numbers. The mortar is doing the work: it is the ordered lipid between the corneocytes, not the corneocytes themselves, that holds water in.
Per equal interval, as drawn in this schematic.
A state that changes, not a fixed skin type.
Transepidermal water loss is what a barrier measurement measures. It moves week to week, which is why measuring once tells you very little.
Work With Us
