Assessing Autonomic Function from Electrodermal Activity and Heart Rate Variability During Cold-Pressor Test and Emotional Challenge

Abstract

Standard functional assessment of autonomic nervous system (AnS) activity on cardiovascular control relies on spectral analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) series. However, difficulties in obtaining a reliable measure of sympathetic activity from HRV spectra limits the exploitation of sympatho-vagal metrics. on the other hand, measures of electrodermal activity (eDA) have been demonstrated to provide a reliable quantifier of sympathetic dynamics. In this study we propose novel indices of phasic autonomic regulation mechanisms by combining HRV and eDA correlates and thoroughly investigating their time-varying dynamics. HRV and EDA series were gathered from 26 healthy subjects during a cold-pressor test and emotional stimuli. instantaneous linear and nonlinear (bispectral) estimates of vagal dynamics were obtained from HRV through inhomogeneous point-process models, and combined with a sensitive maker of sympathetic tone from eDA spectral power. A wavelet decomposition analysis was applied to estimate phasic components of the proposed sympatho-vagal indices. Results show significant statistical differences for the proposed indices between the cold-pressor elicitation and previous resting state. Furthermore, an accuracy of 73.08% was achieved for the automatic emotional valence recognition. the proposed nonlinear processing of phasic AnS markers brings novel insights on autonomic functioning that can be exploited in the field of affective computing and psychophysiology.

Wearables bei Epilepsien

“…Die Messung anfallsassoziierter Änderungen autonomer Funktionen ist zusammenfassend also prinzipiell zur automatisierten Detektion fokaler Anfälle geeignet. Es muss jedoch kritisch hervorgehoben werden, dass Veränderungen der autonomen Aktivität nicht anfallsspezifisch sind, sondern auch verschiedene Alltagsaktivitäten, emotionalen Stress und nächtliche Arousals begleiten, was das Auftreten falsch-positiver Alarme begünstigt [44,45]. Eine Verbesserung der Anfallsdetektion könnte bspw.…”

Promises and partnership in human-robot interaction

“…the EDAsymp index, [31]), the parasympathetic branch (i.e., the HFnu index [32]), and the sympthovagal balance (i.e. EDAHFnu index [33,34]). In Appendix we describe in details how we computed these indexes.…”

Gaussian Processes with Physiologically-Inspired Priors for Physical Arousal Recognition

“…Written informed consent was obtained from all subjects. More details on the dataset can be found in [14].…”

“…3) HRV, EDA-combined feature space (QANS HE ): The correlation between the high-frequency power of the HRV with the parasympathetic activity and the EDA spectral power with the sympathetic outflow led to the proposal of a new index reflecting the sympathovagal balance in our recent studies [14], [20]. This, QANS HE , obtained through a spectral analysis of EDA and HRV signals, has been shown to outperform the previous indicator of sympathovagal activity, leading to a better characterization of ANS dynamics.…”