Investigation of Hydrogel Skin Phantoms Using Terahertz Time-domain Spectroscopy

Human skin phantoms are essential to enable fast, label-free, and reliable testing of pharmaceutical and cosmetic products. We report the characterisation of polyvinyl alcohol-based hydrogel phantoms along with in-vivo skin measurements of three volunteers from 0.2 to 1 THz. The results indicate that frequency-dependent properties of hydrogel phantoms are similar to human skin and show promising prospects of being utilised as a skin equivalent.