Immersive Acoustic Stimulation for Remote Assisted Living: Feedback from Skin Conductance

Auditory stimulation may be leveraged to prevent or address various pathological conditions among older adults, and appears well-suited to remote implementation by exploiting consolidated technologies. In this paper, an Active and Assisted Living (AAL) scenario to remotely provide acoustic stimulation is envisioned, and the study focuses on the analysis of the Skin Conductance (SC) signals acquired with a wearable device from 20 subjects when exposed to two different audio tracks, to quantify the elicited reactions. The latter are also translated into a numerical score by means of a pictorial scale, so to have a subjective but comparable reference. It is found that the second audio track, characterized by higher perceived emotional dominance and arousal, stimulates a more pronounced physiological response than the first track: The average rate of SC peaks increases from 0.01 peaks/s to 0.04 peaks/s. The use of additional frequency bandwidths than those typically considered in the literature for SC processing does not provide statistically significant differences among the audio tracks over the test population (p-value < 0.05). As such, while the feasibility of using quantitative features computed over the SC signals as a feedback measure is confirmed by the study, the identification of the most effective features requires further investigations.