Challenges and Opportunities in Collecting and Modeling Ambulatory Electrodermal Activity Data.

Donna L Coffman,Xizhen Cai,Noelle R Leonard,Runze Li

doi:10.2196/17106

Abstract

Background:Ambulatory assessment of electrodermal activity (EDA) is an emerging technique for capturing individuals’ autonomic responses to real-life events. There is currently little guidance available for processing and analyzing such data in an ambulatory setting.Objective:This study aimed to describe and implement several methods for preprocessing and constructing features for use in modeling ambulatory EDA data, particularly for measuring stress.Methods:We used data from a study examining the effects of stressful tasks on EDA of adolescent mothers (AMs). A biosensor band recorded EDA 4 times per second and was worn during an approximately 2-hour assessment that included a 10-min mother-child videotaped interaction. The initial processing included filtering noise and motion artifacts.Results:We constructed the features of the EDA data, including the number of peaks and their amplitude as well as EDA reactivity, quantified as the rate at which AMs returned to baseline EDA following an EDA peak. Although the pattern of EDA varied substantially across individuals, various features of EDA may be computed for all individuals enabling within- and between-individual analyses and comparisons.Conclusions:The algorithms we developed can be used to construct features for dry-electrode ambulatory EDA, which can be used by other researchers to study stress and anxiety.

Highlights

Electrodermal activity (EDA), commonly known as galvanic skin response, is a measure of sympathetic nervous system activity that is used to assess physiological arousal
We addressed the challenges of collecting ambulatory electrodermal activity (EDA), denoising the data, and detecting meaningful features common across participants
We began by examining plots of the EDA for each mother by task

Summary

Introduction

Background Electrodermal activity (EDA), commonly known as galvanic skin response, is a measure of sympathetic nervous system activity that is used to assess physiological arousal. Much less has been written about the measurement of EDA in ambulatory settings [5], which has recently become popular because of the availability of dry-electrode wrist-worn devices that can be used while participants go about their daily activities. These devices have dry electrodes that are placed on the ventral wrist as opposed to laboratory placement on the palm. Several wrist-worn devices have been developed for the ambulatory collection of EDA as well as temperature and three-axis accelerometry [6,7] (eg, Affectiva Q sensor) and, more recently, blood volume pulse (eg, Empatica E4). There is currently little guidance available for processing and analyzing such data in an ambulatory setting

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion