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Young pregnant teens often face the typical stressors of pregnancy as well as those stemming from social and financial sources. Research has shown that chronic or intense stress can have severe effects on a fetus, potentially leading to birth defects. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) modulates skin conductance as a response to stimuli, and could potentially be used to quantify stress.
Using a simple breadboard, an Arduino Nano, a GSR sensor, and MATLAB, we designed a glove that used Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) to continuously measure skin conductance. We did mock clinical trials involving volunteers wearing the glove while watching clips with predetermined tense or "jumpscare" scenes.
Based on the corresponding nervous system responses in data we concluded that GSR would likely be a viable way to noninvasively and continuously monitor stress, though it would need other sources of monitoring to rule out additional factors.
Calm Data
Calm Data
Data was taken with no stimuli and calm music running in the background. Based on literature, cutoff between stress and no stress is 0.1 microSiemens. out of 478 Phasic GSR points, only 32 found false positives with signals greater than 0.1uS, giving us a specificity of 0.9331
No Stimuli Data
No Stimuli Data
Data was taken when the sensor was not attached to any volunteers to ensure that the data was not being gathered from other sources such as sensor error. No false positives were found.
Volunteer Trials
Volunteer Trials
The trials included 13 scenes from horror movies with the corresponding GSR data shown above as Conductance (uS) vs Time (s). Scenes were predetermined to be "light/low" stressors or "high "stressors. Low and high stress cutoffs in the data were determined using each volunteer's calm data as a baseline.
Sensitivity Analysis
Sensitivity Analysis
For this volunteer, range of 0.1-0.55uS was considered low stress, and anything >0.55uS was considered high stress. All stimuli showed a positive response in the data (>0.1uS). 5 of the 7 low stimuli yielded a low stress response, giving a sensitivity rate of 71.43%. 5 of the 6 high stress stimuli yielded a high stress response, resulting in a sensitivity rate of 83.33%.
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