Correlating Physiologic Measures of Stress: Exploring Dyads in Clinical Surgical Teams

Abstract

Clinical teams are subject to stress from various sources, including the technical and cognitive challenges of providing care in high stakes environments. Existing analytic approaches are limited in their ability to study the interdependence of team member stress. This study explores the correlation of a physiologic marker of stress, blood pulse wave, between members of a working surgical team. We propose an area overlap method as a means of evaluating blood pulse wave time-series correlation as a function of time. This is a stepwise approach to the collection and analysis of a large volume of continuous physiologic data from paired team members in a clinical setting. This method was applied to thirteen surgical team dyads with similar results to Pearson correlation. The area overlap method allows for improved exploration of temporal correlation within dyads but, in its current form, does not identify directionality of correlation.