Proposal and Validation of Method for Measuring Vacant Space Distance in Worn Sanitary Products

-Measurement of Vacant Space Distance in Worn Sanitary Napkins-

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new method that measures the vacant space distance between the human body and sanitary products. The proposed method obtains the vacant space distance by subtraction between human body front surfaces and sanitary products back surfaces. In the developed measurement device, the back surface of sanitary products is measured using a laser displacement transducer on the inside of a partial human body model made of wire netting, and the vacant space distance is obtained by subtracting the front surface of the human body from the back surface of the sanitary products. To evaluate the method we measured the vacant space distance between the human body and sanitary napkins. Evaluation experiments proved that the proposed method is capable of obtaining vacant space distance changes by the differences of weight, crimping, and absorption for sanitary napkins.