| The aim of this study was to
develop a protocol for the rapid measurement of TEWL for a condenser-chamber
instrument.
There are two main components to rapid TEWL measurement: (i)
the measurement time itself and (ii) the recovery time before
the next measurement can be started. The established TEWL guidelines
for open-chamber instruments recommend taking a recovery time
into consideration before starting the next measurement. With
unventilated-chamber instruments, speed is determined more by
time spent clearing the chamber of accumulated vapour than by
time spent measuring flux. Condenser-chamber instruments are different,
because the active microclimate control maintains consistent measurement
conditions, permitting measurement protocols without recovery
time to be developed. This approach was evaluated using both in-vivo
and in-vitro measurements.
Recent studies have indicated that the closed, unventilated-chamber
method is capable of rapid TEWL measurement. Since rapid
is an adjective without absolute meaning, we thought it worthwhile
to relate the speed and performance of the condenser-chamber
site-hopping protocol with an equivalent rapid-measurement protocol
for an unventilated-chamber instrument.
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