Inferring Autonomic Nervous System Stimulation from Hand and Foot Skin Conductance Measurements

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) stimulates various sweat glands. Changes in skin conductance measurements indicate sudomotor nerve activity (SMNA), and could be used in inferring the underlying ANS stimulation. We model hand and foot skin conductance measurements simultaneously using a state-space model with Gaussian errors and sparse impulsive events as inputs to the model. Using a multi-rate formulation, we recover the timing and amplitudes of SMNA using a generalized cross-validation based sparse recovery approach. We analyze experimental and simulated data to validate the performance of the proposed approach and illustrate that we are able to recover the underlying auditory stimuli.