Cited by 526Heart Rate Variability and Autonomic ControlEmotion and Mood RecognitionNon-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring

Innovations in Electrodermal Activity Data Collection and Signal Processing: A Systematic Review

Open access
Posada-Quintero, Hugo F., Chon, Ki H.·2020·Sensors

Abstract

The electrodermal activity (EDA) signal is an electrical manifestation of the sympathetic innervation of the sweat glands. EDA has a history in psychophysiological (including emotional or cognitive stress) research since 1879, but it was not until recent years that researchers began using EDA for pathophysiological applications like the assessment of fatigue, pain, sleepiness, exercise recovery, diagnosis of epilepsy, neuropathies, depression, and so forth. The advent of new devices and applications for EDA has increased the development of novel signal processing techniques, creating a growing pool of measures derived mathematically from the EDA. For many years, simply computing the mean of EDA values over a period was used to assess arousal. Much later, researchers found that EDA contains information not only in the slow changes (tonic component) that the mean value represents, but also in the rapid or phasic changes of the signal. The techniques that have ensued have intended to provide a more sophisticated analysis of EDA, beyond the traditional tonic/phasic decomposition of the signal. With many researchers from the social sciences, engineering, medicine, and other areas recently working with EDA, it is timely to summarize and review the recent developments and provide an updated and synthesized framework for all researchers interested in incorporating EDA into their research.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.3390/s20020479

Cites

74 of 74 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Two components that contribute to measurable changes in EDA have been described: fast galvanic skin responses (phasic) act in the order of 0.5 to 5 s, and the tonic component acts in the order of minutes.

    “Two components that contribute to measurable changes in EDA have been described. The fast galvanic skin responses, also referred to as phasic responses, act in the order of 0.5 to 5 s, whereas the tonic component, which expresses in level changes, acts in the order of minutes26,27”

    From Data quality evaluation in wearable monitoring (2022) · cites this paper as [26]

  • Motion artifacts are a primary cause of bad signal quality.

    “Motion artifacts are a primary cause of bad signal quality, and research has suggested various methods for mitigating these26,39,40.”

    From Data quality evaluation in wearable monitoring (2022) · cites this paper as [26]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 75 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Cacioppo, J.T., Tassinary, L.G., and Berntson, G. (2007). Handbook of Psychophysiology, Cambridge University Press. [3rd ed.].
  2. Martin, I., and Venables, P.H. (1980). Techniques in Psychophysiology, John Wiley & Sons. Psychological Medicine.
  3. Hugdahl, K. (1995). Psychophysiology: The Mind–Body Perspective, Harvard University Press.
  4. Grings, 1974, Recording of electrodermal phenomena, Methods Physiol. Psychol., 1, 273
  5. Boucsein, W. (2012). Electrodermal Activity, Springer Science & Business Media. · DOI · Paper page

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Posada-Quintero, H. F., & Chon, K. H.
Affiliations
University of Connecticut (US)
Corresponding author
Chon, Ki H.
Venue
Sensors
Publisher
MDPI AG
Published
2020-01-15
Volume
20
Issue
2
Pages
479
ISSN
1424-8220 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3000402017
Cited by
525
References
75
Citations by year
2026: 103 · 2025: 92 · 2024: 109 · 2023: 85 · 2022: 57 · 2021: 57 · 2020: 22
FWCI
9.90
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Sensors (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
Office of Naval Research (N00014-19-1-2209)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine › Heart Rate Variability and Autonomic Control
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Emotion and Mood Recognition
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Non-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring
Keywords
electrodermal activity, sympathetic nervous system, sweat glands, psychophysiology, fatigue analysis, pain assessment, sleepiness, post-exercise recovery, epilepsy diagnosis, neuropathy, depression

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review