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In this article, we present a comprehensive measurement system to determine the level of user emotional arousal by the analysis of electrodermal activity (EDA). A number of EDA measurements were collected, while emotions were elicited using specially selected movie sequences. Data collected from 16 participants of the experiment, in conjunction with those from personal questionnaires, were used to determine a large number of 20 features of the EDA, to assess the emotional state of a user. Feature selection was performed using signal processing and analysis methods, while considering user declarations. The suitability of the designed system for detecting the level of emotional arousal was fully confirmed, throughout the number of experiments. The average classification accuracy for two classes of the least and the most stimulating movies varies within the range of 61‒72%.

Light simultaneously induces visual and non-visual effects. Although the differences in the spectral sensitivity of intrinsic photosensitive retinal ganglion cells induce opposing influences on physiological responses, it is difficult to independently measure only non-visual effects. Therefore, the reported effects of light color on physiological responses are inconsistent. This study aimed to clarify the visual and non-visual effects of light color on physiological responses. Three different conditions were employed to construct a lighting environment in which light colors were difficult to perceive due to chromatic adaptation and change blindness: constant white light (baseline condition), a gradual transition from white to blue light, and a gradual transition from white to red light. The physiological responses (brain activity, heart rate variability, and electrodermal activity) of 21 participants were measured with and without light color perception. The results suggested that blue light causes more non-visual effects compared to red light as blue light induces brain activation in some regions of the PFC (p < 0.05) and increases sweating, although the differences were not statistically significant. A mean comparison suggested that the visual effects of blue light showed tendencies toward a calming role for the prefrontal cortex and inhibition of sweating, but the differences were not statistically significant. Another mean comparison suggested that the visual effects of red light tended to enhance sweating, but the differences were not statistically significant. Visual and non-visual effects did not cause significant differences in heart rate variability. Additionally, a mean comparison did not reveal any significant tendencies.

The electrodermal activity (EDA) signal is an electrical manifestation of the sympathetic innervation of the sweat glands. EDA has a history in psychophysiological (including emotional or cognitive stress) research since 1879, but it was not until recent years that researchers began using EDA for pathophysiological applications like the assessment of fatigue, pain, sleepiness, exercise recovery, diagnosis of epilepsy, neuropathies, depression, and so forth. The advent of new devices and applications for EDA has increased the development of novel signal processing techniques, creating a growing pool of measures derived mathematically from the EDA. For many years, simply computing the mean of EDA values over a period was used to assess arousal. Much later, researchers found that EDA contains information not only in the slow changes (tonic component) that the mean value represents, but also in the rapid or phasic changes of the signal. The techniques that have ensued have intended to provide a more sophisticated analysis of EDA, beyond the traditional tonic/phasic decomposition of the signal. With many researchers from the social sciences, engineering, medicine, and other areas recently working with EDA, it is timely to summarize and review the recent developments and provide an updated and synthesized framework for all researchers interested in incorporating EDA into their research.

The negative effects of mental stress on human health has been known for decades. High-level stress must be detected at early stages to prevent these negative effects. After the emergence of wearable devices that could be part of our lives, researchers have started detecting extreme stress of individuals with them during daily routines. Initial experiments were performed in laboratory environments and recently a number of works took a step outside the laboratory environment to the real-life. We developed an automatic stress detection system using physiological signals obtained from unobtrusive smart wearable devices which can be carried during the daily life routines of individuals. This system has modality-specific artifact removal and feature extraction methods for real-life conditions. We further tested our system in a real-life setting with collected physiological data from 21 participants of an algorithmic programming contest for nine days. This event had lectures, contests as well as free time. By using heart activity, skin conductance and accelerometer signals, we successfully discriminated contest stress, relatively higher cognitive load (lecture) and relaxed time activities by using different machine learning methods.

This article introduces a new and unobtrusive wearable monitoring device based on electrodermal activity (EDA) to be used in health-related computing systems. This paper introduces the description of the wearable device capable of acquiring the EDA of a subject in order to detect his/her calm/distress condition from the acquired physiological signals. The lightweight wearable device is placed in the wrist of the subject to allow continuous physiological measurements. With the aim of validating the correct operation of the wearable EDA device, pictures from the International Affective Picture System are used in a control experiment involving fifty participants. The collected signals are processed, features are extracted and a statistical analysis is performed on the calm/distress condition classification. The results show that the wearable device solely based on EDA signal processing reports around 89% accuracy when distinguishing calm condition from distress condition.

There is a strong increase in the use of devices that measure physiological arousal through electrodermal activity (EDA). Although there is a long tradition of studying emotions during learning, researchers have only recently started to use EDA to measure emotions in the context of education and learning. This systematic review aimed to provide insight into how EDA is currently used in these settings. The review aimed to investigate the methodological aspects of EDA measures in educational research and synthesize existing empirical evidence on the relation of physiological arousal, as measured by EDA, with learning outcomes and learning processes. The methodological results pointed to considerable variation in the usage of EDA in educational research and indicated that few implicit standards exist. Results regarding learning revealed inconsistent associations between physiological arousal and learning outcomes, which seem mainly due to underlying methodological differences. Furthermore, EDA frequently fluctuated during different stages of the learning process. Compared to this unimodal approach, multimodal designs provide the potential to better understand these fluctuations at critical moments. Overall, this review signals a clear need for explicit guidelines and standards for EDA processing in educational research in order to build a more profound understanding of the role of physiological arousal during learning.

Electrodermal activity (EDA) usually relates to variations in the electrical properties of palmar or plantar skin sites. EDA responses, namely skin conductance responses (SCRs), skin potential responses (SPRs) and skin susceptance responses (SSRs) are shown to be sensitive indexes of sympathetic nervous system activation and are studied in many research projects. However, the association between EDA responses and the five basic human senses has not been investigated yet. Our study aimed to explore the relationship between the three EDA responses (SCRs, SSRs and SPRs) and the five basic human senses. These three EDA responses were measured simultaneously at the same skin site on each of the 38 volunteers. The tested five senses were sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. The results showed that the different tested senses led to different degrees of EDA responses due to activation of the sympathetic nervous system and corresponding secretion of sweat. Although a controlled study on the degree of EDA as a function of the strength of each stimulus was not performed, we noted that the largest EDA responses were typically associated with the smell sense test. We conclude that EDA responses could be utilized as measures for examining the sensitivity of the human senses. Hence, EDA devices may have important roles in sensory systems for future clinical applications.

People with spider phobia experience excessive anxiety reactions when exposed to spiders that will interfere with daily life. Diagnosing and measuring anxiety levels in patients with spider phobia is a complex challenge. Conventional diagnosis requires psychological evaluations and clinical interviews that take time and often result in a high degree of subjectivity. Therefore, there is a need for a more objective and efficient approach to measuring anxiety levels in patients. This study performs anxiety level classification based on electrodermal activity, electrocardiogram (ECG) and respiratory signals using the dataset of Arachnophobia subjects. Each raw data is preprocessed using 24 types of features. Feature performance is processed using the recursive feature elimination method. Data processing was performed in 3 anxiety levels (high, medium, low) and two anxiety levels (high, low) with the support vector machine method and hold-out validation method (7:3). The performance of the model is evaluated by showing the accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score values. The polynomial kernel can perform optimal classification and obtain 100% accuracy in 2 classes and three classes with 100% precision, recall, and F1 score values. This result shows excellent potential in measuring anxiety levels that correlate with mental health issues.

One of the main objectives of Active and Assisted Living (AAL) environments is to ensure that elderly and/or disabled people perform/live well in their immediate environments; this can be monitored by among others the recognition of emotions based on non-highly intrusive sensors such as Electrodermal Activity (EDA) sensors. However, designing a learning system or building a machine-learning model to recognize human emotions while training the system on a specific group of persons and testing the system on a totally a new group of persons is still a serious challenge in the field, as it is possible that the second testing group of persons may have different emotion patterns. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the field of human emotion recognition by proposing a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture which ensures promising robustness-related results for both subject-dependent and subject-independent human emotion recognition. The CNN model has been trained using a grid search technique which is a model hyperparameter optimization technique to fine-tune the parameters of the proposed CNN architecture. The overall concept’s performance is validated and stress-tested by using MAHNOB and DEAP datasets. The results demonstrate a promising robustness improvement regarding various evaluation metrics. We could increase the accuracy for subject-independent classification to 78% and 82% for MAHNOB and DEAP respectively and to 81% and 85% subject-dependent classification for MAHNOB and DEAP respectively (4 classes/labels). The work shows clearly that while using solely the non-intrusive EDA sensors a robust classification of human emotion is possible even without involving additional/other physiological signals.