A Real-World Neuroimaging System to Evaluate Stress

While the laboratory setting offers researchers a great deal of experimental control, this environment also limits how generalizable the results are to the real world. This is particularly true when studying the multifaceted phenomenon of stress, which often relies on personal experience, a dimension that is difficult to reproduce in the laboratory setting. This paper describes a novel, multi-aspect real-world integrated neuroimaging system (MARIN) optimized to study physiological phenomena in the real-world and particularly suited to the study of stress. This system integrates neurological data from a gel-free, wireless EEG device with physiological data from wireless cardiac and skin conductance sensors, as well as self-reports of activity and stress. Coordination of the system is managed through an Android handheld mobile device that also logs salient events and presents inventories for subjective reports of stress. The integration of these components creates a rich, multimodal dataset with minimal interference to the user’s daily life, and these data will guide the further understanding of neurological mechanisms of stress.