Emotional State Analysis Using Handheld Portable ECG Device

Emotional states affect human performance in their daily life as well as their workplaces. Sustained negative emotions like sadness causes long term depression which ultimately leads to cardiovascular diseases and induce suicidal tendencies. Therefore, emotion analysis is important for analyzing human behavioral pattern and well-being. Bio signal based emotional state/affect analysis is getting popularity due to availability of portable bio signal recorders like EGC, EEG etc. In this paper we tried to investigate the changes that take place in ECG waveforms due to certain changes in a person's emotional states (i.e. happiness, sadness and anger). ECG signals from 7 subjects of duration of 1 min were recorded with a portable FDA cleared ECG device (Kardia mobile designed by AliveCor) by applying audiovisual stimulus and the HRV parameters were calculated for analyzing the pattern of changes in that HRV features on ECG. Then the results were compared with some of the research results as presented in different literature for affect recognition. The results matched with the reported pattern of HRV changes which indicate that a portable ECG device can be used to collect the ECG data and analyze it to give acceptable information about emotional changes.