Electrodermal Activity for Measuring Cognitive and Emotional Stress Level

Abstract

Stress can lead to harmful conditions in the body, such as anxiety disorders and depression. One of the promising noninvasive methods, which has been widely used in detecting stress and emotion, is electrodermal activity (EDA). EDA has a tonic and phasic component called skin conductance level and skin conductance response (SCR). However, the components of the EDA cannot be directly extracted and need to be deconvolved to obtain it. The EDA signals were collected from 18 healthy subjects that underwent three sessions – Stroop test with increasing stress levels. The EDA signals were then deconvoluted by using continuous deconvolution analysis (CDA) and convex optimization approach to electrodermal activity (cvxEDA). Four features from the result of the deconvolution process were collected, namely sample average, standard deviation, first absolute difference, and normalized first absolute difference. Those features were used as the input of the classification process using the extreme learning machine (ELM). The output of classification was the stress level; mild, moderate, and severe. The visual of the phasic component using cvxEDA is more precise or smoother than the CDA's result. However, both methods could separate SCR from the original skin conductivity raw and indicate the small peaks from the SCR. The classification process results showed that both CDA and cvxEDA methods with 50 hidden layers in ELM had a high accuracy in classifying the stress level, which was 95.56% and 94.45%, respectively. This study developed a stress level classification method using ELM and the statistical features of SCR. The result showed that EDA could classify the stress level with over 94% accuracy. This system could help people monitor their mental health during overworking, leading to anxiety and depression because of untreated stress.

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“…Finally, the number of peaks of the SCR component was also computed considering 10-s windows before and after each phase transition [ 52 ]. This choice considered the number of generated peaks in relation to the level of cognitive and emotional stress [ 53 ].…”

Application of DIY Electrodermal Activity Wristband in Detecting Stress and Affective Responses of Students

“…EDA comprises both tonic and phasic components, represented, respectively, by skin conductance level (SCL) and skin conductance response (SCR). It is closely linked to human stress and emotional responses and can be measured noninvasively [ 6 ]. Hence, it is a viable option for reliable and accurate assessment of human stress and emotions in a more comfortable setting outside laboratories.…”

“…This is especially so because productivity and stress management is an area of interest. EDA is linked to the sympathetic nervous system and consists of two components: tonic and phasic, which are represented by skin conductance level (SCL) and skin conductance response (SCR) [ 6 ]. For the frequency domain, features relative to EDASymp, TVSymp (spectral powers in specific frequency bands according to Posada-Quintero et al (2016a; 2016b) [ 7 , 8 ] and their normalized versions were focused on as they were found to be highly sensitive to orthostatic, cognitive, and physical stress (Posada-Quintero et al, 2020) [ 9 ].…”

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“…Predicting emotional or psychological states [193,194] and monitoring stress levels [195] Magnetometer (Time series)…”