The microcirculation consists of a vascular network that includes arterioles, venules and capillaries. Skin microcirculation is an important physiological parameter for advanced clinical applications such as Raynaud's syndrome or the prevention of ulcers. Many non-ambulatory methods were developed to measure blood microcirculation. The current trend in the field of health technology is the miniaturization of sensors and their associated instrumentation to make them non-invasive, portable by the patient and adapted to ambulatory measurements in time real, or also known as « ecological ». The manuscript presents the design and the realization of an ambulatory miniaturized electronic system (μHematron), to achieve continuous monitoring of the effective thermal conductivity in real-time that is the image of the microcirculation in the capillaries. The first experimentation was performed to compare the µHematron system with a laser Doppler flowmetry monitor, during a study which aims to evaluate thermal comfort in humans. A study of the effects of different temperature environments on a group of skin parameters of healthy subjects, including the cutaneous microcirculation, was performed. Correlations between changes in the two signals of both instrumentations for neutral, hot and cold temperatures are presented. The second experimentation is aimed to a preliminary study of the global effect of medical compression stockings on the cutaneous microcirculation of the lower extremities of healthy subjects. Thanks to the ambulatory instrumentation, the microcirculation has been measured continuously for different postures of subject: lying, sitting, standing and walking, and this for different classes of compression stockings (I, II, and III). This study has improved the understanding of the effect of these stockings on healthy subjects.
