Preliminary Results of IoT-Enabled EDA-Based Analysis of Physiological Response to Acoustic Stimuli

Emotions play a key role in everyday life of human beings, and since several years, researchers have investigated the physiological changes caused by external stimuli, looking for methods to automatically classify the emotional involvement of individuals. The Galvanic Skin Response, or ElectroDermal Activity, is one of the most interesting signals used in emotion research. In this preliminary study, a few participants were submitted to auditory stimuli (i.e., pleasant, neutral and unpleasant sounds) and their skin conductance signals were measured by means of a wireless and IoT-enabled wearable device, the Empatica E4. To investigate the impact of the emotional stimuli, data measured as emotion elicitation and retrieved from the Empatica cloud platform, was analysed in the time domain, showing that pleasant and neutral sounds do not produce evident effects, while listening to an unpleasant sound increases the subjective response, with higher impact when the sound duration is shorter. The preliminary outcomes obtained confirm great intra- and inter-subject variability that deserves further investigation, by involving a bigger population of test users.