Preliminary analysis of features based on GSR/RR signals for spinal cord injury patients

The main objective of this work is to perform a preliminary study of the potential of using physiological signals as biomarkers for the identification of Autonomic Dysreflexia (AD) in patients suffering from a spinal cord injury. For this purpose, a test was done in which patients' bladder was filled with a saline solution for producing effects related to dysreflexia in their organism. Two biosignals were collected from the patients' body during this test: the electrocardiogram and the GSR sweating signal. Later, the research team extracted global features from the complete signal records and local features using a sliding window analysis approach. Finally, these features were analysed to see how strongly they were correlated to different dysreflexia states. This analysis showed that more than half of the extracted features belong to the first quartile, 41 out of 79, some of them even reaching a 99.9% correlation score.