New Technology for Stress Reduction

The change in sweat activity is called skin conductance response (SCR). Measuring this ability will help in monitoring stress and even lower it. To collect and study these physiological signals of stress, a research team has built a new closed-loop technology by placing two electrodes on smartwatch-type wearables.

A new study steps toward the ultimate goal of monitoring brain responses using wearable devices and closing the loop to keep a person’s stress state within a pleasant range. These findings are published in the journal IEEE Xplore.

Stress is a worldwide issue that can result in catastrophic health and financial complications. A recent Gallup poll found that more than one in three adults (35%) worldwide said they experienced stress every day.

Electrodermal activity (i.e., the electrical conductivity of the skin) carries important information about the brain's cognitive stress. Using this signal processing technique, we can track the hidden stress state and design an appropriate control algorithm for regulating the stress state and closing the loop.

The results of the research illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach and validate its feasibility of being implemented in real life.

“To the best of our knowledge, this research is one of the very first to relate the cognitive stress state to the changes in SCR events and design the control mechanism to close the loop in a real-time simulation system,” said UH doctoral student and lead study author Fekri Azgomi, who accomplished the task of closed-loop cognitive stress regulation in a simulation study based on experimental data.

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Due to the increased ubiquity of wearable devices capable of measuring cognitive stress-related variables, the proposed architecture is an initial step toward treating cognitive disorders using non-invasive brain state decoding.

The final results will verify that the proposed architecture has great potential to be implemented in a wrist-worn wearable device and used in daily life.

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Source-Medindia