It is well known that when we get stressed, or experience an emotional event (happy, sad, etc) that our autonomic nervous system causes physiological changes to our heart rate, skin temperature and dilation, and we can sweat. Most affective sensor systems that try to predict the user’s emotion and stress level use skin electrical conductance as a proxy for sweat.
Our research is looking into the biomarkers in sweat that the body produces when stressed or emotional. Our hypothesis is that detecting the biomarkers in sweat will aid affective systems, with the aim to develop a sensor to detect the biomarkers in sweat that can go on a smart watch.
We have an open-access structured literature review paper discussing which biomarkers are in sweat so that future sensors know what to look for:
Zamkah. A., Hui, T. K. L., Andrews, S., Dey, N., Shi, F. and Sherratt, R. S. (2020) Identification of Suitable Biomarkers for Stress and Emotion Detection for Future Personal Affective Wearable Sensors. Biosensors, 10 (4), 40; doi: 10.3390/bios10040040
This research is performed by PhD student Abdulaziz Zamkah. The project is supervised by Eur Ing Professor R Simon Sherratt and Professor Simon Andrews. The research is also supported by Dr Terence Hui.