New Device for Assessment of Autonomous Nervous System Functioning in Psychophysiology

In the paper a new device for autonomic nervous system patterns assessment with application in psychophysiology is presented. The system is characterized by two physical sensing channels, expressed by skin conductance and ballistography (BCG), and a set of virtual sensing channels based on advanced processing of the physical channels information to obtain heart rate, respiratory signal, sympathetic flow to the heart and sweat glands, parasympathetic outflow to the heart and heart rate variability measurement. A low cost, small size acquisition multifunction input-output board is used to control the conditioning circuits and to acquire the voltage of the sensing channels. Referring to the software, an advanced processing block including digital filters, peak-detector and wavelet decomposition block was designed and implemented using LabVIEW. The system permits quantification of skin conductance variation and heart rate variability for different psychophysiological and pathological state.