Comparison of Wearable and Clinical Devices for Acquisition of Peripheral Nervous System Signals.

Andrea Bizzego,Giulio Gabrieli,Gianluca Esposito,Cesare Furlanello

doi:10.3390/s20236778

Abstract

A key access point to the functioning of the autonomic nervous system is the investigation of peripheral signals. Wearable devices (WDs) enable the acquisition and quantification of peripheral signals in a wide range of contexts, from personal uses to scientific research. WDs have lower costs and higher portability than medical-grade devices. However, the achievable data quality can be lower, and data are subject to artifacts due to body movements and data losses. It is therefore crucial to evaluate the reliability and validity of WDs before their use in research. In this study, we introduce a data analysis procedure for the assessment of WDs for multivariate physiological signals. The quality of cardiac and electrodermal activity signals is validated with a standard set of signal quality indicators. The pipeline is available as a collection of open source Python scripts based on the pyphysio package. We apply the indicators for the analysis of signal quality on data simultaneously recorded from a clinical-grade device and two WDs. The dataset provides signals of six different physiological measures collected from 18 subjects with WDs. This study indicates the need to validate the use of WDs in experimental settings for research and the importance of both technological and signal processing aspects to obtain reliable signals and reproducible results.

Highlights

The quantification of peripheral physiological nervous signals is a core step in measuring the functioning of the autonomic nervous system [1]
We adopted a set of signal quality indicators (SQIs) derived from the literature to assess the overall quality of the cardiac signals and Electrodermal activity (EDA) signals provided in the Wearable and Clinical Signals (WCS) dataset
The signals collected with the clinical device showed an optimal signal quality in the baseline session, indicating that the experimental design and settings were appropriate for the acquisition of scientific-level data

Summary

Introduction

The quantification of peripheral physiological nervous signals is a core step in measuring the functioning of the autonomic nervous system [1]. The application of WDs is boosted by their improved portability (e.g., increasing miniaturization and battery life) [7,8], as well as by new materials [9,10] and layouts with reduced invasiveness; e.g., epidermal tattoos [11], wireless ring pulse oximeter [12], garments [13] and masks [14]. Besides their higher portability, WDs may have an apparent lower cost than clinical-grade devices, enabling their diffusion in commercial applications [15]. Wearable technologies could represent novel tools in the study of human physiology and autonomic responses to the scientific community [1,16], Sensors 2020, 20, 6778; doi:10.3390/s20236778 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors

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Results

Conclusion