Relaxation helps to reduce physical, mental, and emotional pressure. Relaxation techniques generally enable a person to obtain calmness and well-being by reducing stress, anxiety, or anger. When a person becomes calm the body reacts physiologically, producing the so-called Relaxation Response (RResp) which affects the organism in a positive manner, no matter if it is during a state of relaxation or in the middle of a stressful period. The goal of this paper is to design a system capable of identifying automatically the RResps of a subject by analyzing a single physiological signal, the galvanic skin response (GSR). To do so, a team composed of psychologists, neurologists, and engineers designed two experiments for inducing RResps in the participants while their GSR signals were being collected. The team analyzed the data and identified three different levels of RResp that can be quantified using only two easily calculated GSR features. Moreover, the use of the surface produced by GSR and its linear approximation is totally novel. Finally, the data were classified using decision tree strategies for each of the experiments and, after seeing that the obtained trees were similar, the team synthesized them in a single classification system. The F1 values obtained by the generalized classifier scored between 0.966 and 1.000 for the data collected in both experiments.
A Self-Paced Relaxation Response Detection System Based on Galvanic Skin Response Analysis
Publication
IEEE Access
Vol 7, pp. 43730 - 43741
Abstract
Web and Email Links
Related Listings
Journal
Behavioral Medicine
This study evaluated the efficacy of the relaxation response on the postoperative recovery of 27 cardiac surgery patients randomly assigned to one of two groups. Thirteen experimental group patients received educational information and practiced eliciting the relaxation response before and after surgery. The 14 patients in the control group received only information. Experimental and control groups were compared before and after surgery on both physiological and psychological recovery […]
Journal
PLOS ONE
Background Poor psychological and physical resilience in response to stress drives a great deal of health care utilization. Mind-body interventions can reduce stress and build resiliency. The rationale for this study is therefore to estimate the effect of mind-body interventions on healthcare utilization. Objective Estimate the effect of mind body training, specifically, the Relaxation Response Resiliency Program (3RP) on healthcare utilization. Design Retrospective controlled […]
Journal
Consciousness and Cognition
Although research has found that long-term mindfulness meditation practice promotes executive functioning and the ability to sustain attention, the effects of brief mindfulness meditation training have not been fully explored. We examined whether brief meditation training affects cognition and mood when compared to an active control group. After four sessions of either meditation training or listening to a recorded book, participants with no prior meditation experience were assessed w […]