A damage threshold for skeletal muscle under sustained mechanical loading

Since people started to study the aetiology of pressure ulcers, an important objective has been to identify a damage threshold to predict, how much mechanical loading the tissues can sustain before damage is initiated. Many experimental as well as patient-related studies have been performed to find such a threshold, but they have been largely limited as they compared global external loads with a vague description of internal damage. The present chapter describes the investigations at Eindhoven University of Technology to find a threshold, which is a property. Such a threshold should be generic in nature, in the sense that it could be used as a predictive property for different experimental configurations and in the clinical setting.