A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-Term Assessment of Electrodermal Activity

By Ming-Zher Poh, N. C. Swenson, Rosalind W. Picard. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2010

724 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a sensitive index of sympathetic nervous system activity. Due to the lack of sensors that can be worn comfortably during normal daily activity and over extensive periods of time, research in this area is limited to laboratory settings or artificial clinical environments. We developed a novel, unobtrusive, nonstigmatizing, wrist-worn integrated sensor, and present, for the very first time, a demonstration of long-term, continuous assessment of EDA outside of a laboratory setting. We evaluated the performance of our device against a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved system for the measurement of EDA during physical, cognitive, as well as emotional stressors at both palmar and distal forearm sites, and found high correlations across all the tests. We also evaluated the choice of electrode material by comparing conductive fabric with Ag/AgCl electrodes and discuss the limitations found. An important result presented in this paper is evidence that the distal forearm is a viable alternative to the traditional palmar sites for EDA measurements. Our device offers the unprecedented ability to perform comfortable, long-term, and in situ assessment of EDA. This paper opens up opportunities for future investigations that were previously not feasible, and could have far-reaching implications for diagnosis and understanding of psychological or neurological conditions.

Subfields: Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/008d081a5eb2cf4e57a034a0157ee63ba2ce5c10

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In Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine

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Citations in the corpus

Wearable Sensors for Remote Health Monitoring (2017, neutral): “[85] A small wristband for unobtrusive and continuous EDA measurements during everyday activities Ag/AgCl electrodes Dorsal forearms 2.”
The emerging field of mobile health (2015, background): “…has been developed around the ability to monitor autonomic nervous system function or so-called electrodermal metrics (galvanic skin response) and/or heart rate variability, with a goal of providing objective data of individualized daily variations in levels of emotional stress and anxiety ( 7 ).”
AffectAura: an intelligent system for emotional memory (2012, methodology): “Our sensor suite included a wearable wrist sensor [26] to record EDA and three axis acceleration of the wrist of the participant throughout each day.”
Empatica E3 — A wearable wireless multi-sensor device for real-time computerized biofeedback and data acquisition (2014, background): “, fingers, palm, and wrist) [4], although in most cases the EDA measures made at the wrist are correlated with the traditional placements [5], [6].”
Seizure detection, seizure prediction, and closed-loop warning systems in epilepsy. (2014, neutral): “[106,109,111,113] and Fletcher et al.”
Sensor Mania! The Internet of Things, Wearable Computing, Objective Metrics, and the Quantified Self 2.0 (2012, positive): “One team created a wristband to detect convulsive seizures through electrodermal activity and accelerometry, a useful improvement over lab-based EEG methods as the device can be worn continuously [12].”
Unobtrusive Sensing and Wearable Devices for Health Informatics (2014, methodology): “…and postictal generalized EEG suppression (PGES) duration, an autonomic biomarker of seizure intensity, indicates that EDA can be used as a surrogate measurement of PGES for ambulatory monitoring of epilepsy and thus provides opportunity for the identiﬁcation of sudden death in epilepsy [104].”
A Review of Emotion Recognition Using Physiological Signals (2018, background): “A novel solution [59] was presented to enable comfortable long-term assessment of EDA (the same as GSR) in the form of a wearable and fully integrated EDA sensor (Figure 8e,f).”
From Wearable Sensors to Smart Implants-–Toward Pervasive and Personalized Healthcare (2015, methodology): “9 6 6 6 6 Obesity (Nike ) Emotional stress [23] Parkinson’s disease [24, 25] Stroke rehabilitation [26] Neo-natal ICU [25]”
Innovations in Electrodermal Activity Data Collection and Signal Processing: A Systematic Review (2020, methodology): “Later, an unobtrusive wrist-worn integrated sensor was tested in a study for ambulatory, long-term, continuous assessment of EDA [36].”