This blog article has been guest-authored by Luca Menghini, a Ph.D. candidate at the Psychophysiology Lab of the University of Padua, Italy. Luca’s research interests focus on the validation and use of wearable technology for measuring biosignals associated with stress—particularly workplace stress, sleep, and health.
Wearable technology has extensively developed in recent years, opening an unprecedented window of opportunity for the long-term unobtrusive assessment of psychophysiological processes in daily life. Particularly in stress research, it can be used to investigate both short-term reactivity to daily stressors (e.g., job demand), and the prolonged activation possibly following the exposure to stressors (e.g., during evening time), even at night (sleep autonomic functioning). If wearables are evidently useful to move physiological measurement outside the laboratory setting, they can also substantially shorten the time required for laboratory assessment, while improving its ecological validity.Unfortunately, most wearable devices are consumer-oriented, use undisclosed algorithms, and only provide summaries (e.g., average heart rate per minute) or proprietary metrics (e.g., “recovery score”) instead of raw data, implying excessive uncertainty to be used in scientific research. That is why we focused on the , a research-grade multisensor device that provides access to the raw data continuously recorded from the wrist of the participant. Specifically, in our study, , we evaluated the accuracy of E4-derived measures of heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), and skin conductance compared to gold-standard measurements.
