Effect of movements on the electrodermal response after a startle event

Abstract

Due to the fact that the electrodermal activity (EDA) is of high interest for stress research there is a need of a continuous measurement of the EDA. In studies related to the EDA exists nowadays a large discrepancy between the use of controlled environment studies and daily life surveys. This paper steps into this gap by presenting the effect of continuous, stationary movements on the EDA. During an extensive experiment, we performed controlled speeds of walking as movements and startle events as an actuator. We evaluated whether it may be possible to provoke and measure the EDA response to the startle event during these different walking speeds. Our study contributes to the knowledge about the reliability of the EDA in real life applications. For this work, we developed a special EDA-sensor that measures the EDA, performs signal preprocessing of the EDA and simultaneously measures the acceleration of the fingers.

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