A Flexible Wearable Device for Measurement of Cardiac, Electrodermal, and Motion Parameters in Mental Healthcare Applications.

Abstract

Mental illnesses are vast and cause a lot of individual and social discomfort, with significant healthcare costs associated in terms of diagnosis and treatment. They can be triggered by a number of factors including stress, fatigue or anxiety. The associated physiological, cardiac and autonomic changes can be assessed, centrally, through brain imaging or, peripherally, by other signal recording modalities. With recent advances in wearable devices, these parameters can now be assessed in natural living conditions as associated mood disorders such as obsessive/compulsive behavior or depression are difficult to be examined in controlled settings. In this paper, we present a low-powered and flexible device with electrocardiogram (ECG), galvanic skin response (GSR), temperature and bio-motion detection channels, with signal accuracies of 62 μV for ECG, 6.6 kΩ for GSR, 0.13 °C for temperature and 0.04 g for acceleration. Potential applications include mental health assessment of patients during daily activities at home and/or work through non-continuous and multimodal sensing as demonstrated in this paper during exercise, rest and mental activities performed by healthy individuals only, achieving an overall accuracy of 89% in the classification of the different tasks executed by volunteers.