Breathe Easy EDA

Breathe Easy EDA identifies and removes respiration-related artifacts from electrodermal activity (EDA) recordings to improve accuracy of skin conductance response (SCR) analyses of sympathetic nervous system arousal using a MATLAB toolbox.

Key Features:

• MATLAB implementation: Implemented as a MATLAB toolbox for analysis of EDA and respiration data.
• Visual inspection: Provides visual inspection of EDA recordings to identify fluctuations associated with respiratory patterns and deep breaths.
• Artifact elimination: Identifies and eliminates respiration-induced artifacts from EDA time series to reduce false positives in SCR detection.
• EDA data analysis: Measures tonic (baseline) and phasic (event-related) components of skin conductance for nuanced autonomic assessment.
• Reliability analyses: Performs reliability assessment of artifact identification to evaluate consistency of data cleaning.
• Flexibility and customization: Supports configurable parameters including trial structure and analysis settings for studies with concurrent EDA and respiration recordings.

Scientific Applications:

• Experimental psychology: Improves fidelity of SCR measures used as indicators of sympathetic nervous system arousal in psychological experiments.
• Psychophysiology: Enhances interpretation of autonomic responses by removing respiration-related confounds from EDA data.
• Concurrent EDA–respiration studies: Enables artifact management in studies that record EDA and respiration simultaneously to reduce respiration-induced measurement error.

Methodology:

MATLAB-based visual inspection and analytical processing, identification and elimination of respiration-related artifacts, measurement of tonic and phasic SCR components, reliability assessment of artifact identification, and configurable trial-structure and analysis settings.