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.