Performance of Polymeric Skin Adhesives during Perspiration

Skin adhesives are polymer materials used for attaching medical devices to the skin. Probing the performance of such adhesives is of great interest for rational material formulation. Here, we present a perspiration simulator, which includes a skin mimicking gelatin substrate with controlled roughness and the ability to perspire with a tunable sweat rate. The setup was used for probing peel adhesion of adhesives under realistic wear conditions. Adhesives with indistinguishable rheological properties but different ability to absorb artificial sweat were evaluated. The rheological properties were fixed to decouple the bulk mechanical properties from events occurring at the substrate–adhesive interface. The effects of application pressure, dwell time, and perspiration were quantified for each adhesive formulation. Here, we found that sweat introduced at the substrate–adhesive interface restricts further bonding of the adhesives by limiting viscous flow. Water-absorbing skin adhesives were found to have significantly higher peel forces compared to nonabsorbing adhesives under sweating conditions where the adhesive could absorb the introduced sweat.