Wearable Technology Insights: Unveiling Physiological Responses During Three Different Socially Anxious Activities

Abstract

Wearable technology holds promise for monitoring and managing Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), yet the absence of clear biomarkers specific to SAD hampers its effectiveness. This article explores this issue by presenting a study investigating variances in heart rate, heart rate variability, and skin conductance between socially anxious and non-anxious individuals. One hundred eleven non-clinical student participants participated in groups of three in three anxiety-provoking activities (i.e., speech, group discussion, and interview) in a controlled lab-based study. During the study, electrocardiogram (ECG) and electrodermal activity (EDA) signals were captured via on-body electrodes. During data analysis, participants were divided into four groups based on their self-reported anxiety level (“none,” “mild,” “moderate,” and “severe”). Between-group analysis shows that discriminating ECG features (i.e., heart rate and MeanNN) could identify anxious individuals during anxiety-provoking activities, while EDA could not. Moreover, the discriminating ECG features improved the classification accuracy of anxious and non-anxious individuals in different machine-learning techniques. The findings need to be further scrutinized in real-world settings for the generalizability of the results.