Feasibility of an electrodermal activity ring prototype as a research tool

Abstract

Electrodermal activity is an indicator of sympathetic activation and a useful tool for investigating psychological and physiological arousal. Novel wearable skin conductivity sensors offer portable low-cost solutions for long-term monitoring. In this article we compare the similarity of signals between a prototype of the wearable Moodmetric EDA Ring and a laboratory-grade skin conductance sensor in a psychophysiological experiment. The similarity of the signals was estimated by calculating the cosine distance between phasic features extracted from decomposed signals. The similarity was on average 83.3% ± 16.4%. The compound error of the decomposition process was also investigated and no systematic bias was observed towards either device. We conclude that the prototype ring is a promising device for ecologically valid field studies.