Challenges and Opportunities in Collecting and Modeling Ambulatory Electrodermal Activity Data

BACKGROUND: Ambulatory assessment of electrodermal activity (EDA) is an emerging technique for capturing individuals’ autonomic responses to real-life events. There is currently little guidance available for processing and analyzing such data in an ambulatory setting. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to describe and implement several methods for preprocessing and constructing features for use in modeling ambulatory EDA data, particularly for measuring stress. METHODS: We used data from a study examining the effects of stressful tasks on EDA of adolescent mothers (AMs). A biosensor band recorded EDA 4 times per second and was worn during an approximately 2-hour assessment that included a 10-min mother-child videotaped interaction. The initial processing included filtering noise and motion artifacts. RESULTS: We constructed the features of the EDA data, including the number of peaks and their amplitude as well as EDA reactivity, quantified as the rate at which AMs returned to baseline EDA following an EDA peak. Although the pattern of EDA varied substantially across individuals, various features of EDA may be computed for all individuals enabling within- and between-individual analyses and comparisons. CONCLUSIONS: The algorithms we developed can be used to construct features for dry-electrode ambulatory EDA, which can be used by other researchers to study stress and anxiety.