Engineering Prosthetic Elastomers to Mimic Facial Skin Properties

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Many military combat injuries involve the head and neck. Often these injuries result in losses of noses, eyes, ears or jaws. These missing facial structures are no longer able to function, and they produce deformities in facial appearance. When lost facial structures cannot be corrected surgically, they are replaced by artificial prostheses. Head and face prostheses should reproduce lost structures to the finest detail, be color matched to the patient’s skin and feel like skin. Although currently used materials permit adequate color matching with skin, unfortunately they are very rigid, inflexible and do not feel like skin. New materials are needed to better replicate the flexibility, compressibility and feel of human facial skin. The goal of this research is to develop a new generation of flexible materials that will produce facial prostheses that feel like human facial skin. The project will rely on engineering optimization methods to help design and test new formulations that yield materials capable of reproducing specific properties of the human forehead, nose, chin, cheek and ear. Using physical property measurements previously obtained for these five areas of the face, flexible polymers (plastics) will be constructed in a manner that reproduces facial skin at these locations. Combinations of nanofillers, polymer molecular weight, crosslinker content and co-monomer mixtures will be optimized to achieve the project’s goal of developing new prosthetic materials. Successful completion of the project is expected to lead to products eventually becoming available to clinicians and anaplastologists.