ISELQUI TECHNOLOGY - progetto europeo SLID - progetto europeo SLID
Social and Labour Integration of the Disabled
REPORT OF STRESS CONDITION OF DISABLED WORKER
LOGICAL SCHEMA OF BSN
Architecture of the system
PMH is a simple gateway that send data received via Bluetooth through the communication channel (PSTN, GSM, IP,…). PMH role is limited to the function of hub to external world.
Data elaboration and alarm logic are stored in a measurement device. Wearable sensor is a bracelet, easy to wear and to use. The data generated by MoCaS devices are sent to a central server.
A rehabilitation assessment method using MoCaS devices provides detailed information regarding the person undergoing the rehabilitation. The device is able to monitor the users in different environments (home and workplace) in order to manage emergency situations and to monitor the stress effects of independent life re-introduction.
The target groups chosen for the pilots foreseen in the SLID project, include people in rehabilitation for reasons of mental and physical health, young people un-employed for long-term who have trouble in integrating themselves into society.
Iselqui and MoCaS aim is to offer new technological solutions to improve their quality of life. They also contribute to standard definitions from a technological (for exchanging information) and methodological (new practices and paths to be followed in the social and health sectors) point of view, based on and in support of the existing standards and procedures.
The pilots
Some important physiological pointers (such as heart rate and electrodermal activity ) are been registered during the normal job activity in a group constituted by disabled people comes from different countries in the Adriatic area (Italy,
Croatia and Albania).
In particular, in each disabled person , it is been confirmed that the electrodermal activity is the most sensible and fast pointer in response to the stimuli comes from the job environment.
Skin conductance, also known as galvanic skin response (GSR), electrodermal response (EDR), psychogalvanic reflex (PGR), skin conductance response (SCR) or skin conductance level (SCL), is a method of measuring the electrical conductance of the skin, which varies with its moisture level.
This is of interest because the skinconductance is used as an indication of psychological or physiological arousal. Therefore, if the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system is highly aroused, then sweat gland activity will also increase, which in turn increases skin conductance.
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In this way, skin conductance can be used as a measure of emotional and sympathetic responses. There has been a long history of electrodermal activity research, most of it dealing with spontaneous fluctuations or reactions to stimuli.
data collected and analyzed during these pilots are part of a project based on the research and optimization of disabled workers. This project, founded by UE, is called SLID “Social and Labour Integration of the Disabled”.
The data are reported to 25 persons: 4 in Italy, 10 in Croatia and 11 in Albania. For each country the disabled people are selected and comes from an association oriented of their labour insertion. Among these 25 persons there are: 9 female and 16 male, all of them are between 25 and 62 years old.
The data are reported according the privacy law, in fact the data collected by each person is stored using an anonymous method. Each person is called with a capital letter and a number: capital letter is used for a Country (I=Italy, C=Croatia and A=Albania) while the number is used as progressive number to identify the person (for example I3 is the Italian disabled person with the identification number=3).
The correspondence of number and the right identity of the disabled person is written in a reserved register, which belongs to each association.
Each pilot is 5 days long and two different pilots are separated by two weeks for technical issues. To study the most significant data, the criteria used are: to collect the physiological information, to analyze the most complete information and, then, to analyze the most homogeneous information among the different persons.
Physiological Data
Stress is a person’s response to a stressor such as an environmental condition or a stimulus. Stress is a body’s way to react to a challenge. According to the stressful event, the body’s way to respond to stress is by sympathetic nervous system activation which results in the fight-or-flight response.
Stress typically describes a negative condition or a positive condition that can have an impact on a person’s mental and physical well-being. The answer to the stress depends on the people: same stimuli don’t cause the same reaction in different people or different stress conditions can cause same answer in different people.
A example it’s possible that the same stress is well allowed to some person but it becomes pathological and create disorders and illness.
Furthermore it can happen the opposite thing: a stimulus characterized by an high stress in someone is well allowed thanks to an higher own resistance or thanks to some adapted self-control techniques (not
repressive).
That means that an organism follows a well defined biological schema but it’s able to modulate the entity and the level of answer to stress, when it’s put stress upon itself again and again (Timio, 1980).
In some person when the muscular tension decreases, the skin conductance decreases ad well: this is pondered as arousal index. In fact electrodermal response (EDR) is well known as important parameter to provide important information about emotional status of a person.
For this reason we can consider that a its fast grown is an unfailing index of anxiousness.
In a letdown condition it’s registered as an increase of temperature while when the electrodermal activity decreases
it’s registered an increase of temperature ((GSR-TEMP are tie-in in inverse way).
In fact if the muscle tone decreases
the electrodermal activity decreases because a higher vasodilatation bring an increase of external temperature.
The indexes of psychophysical status are Heart Rate (HR) and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR).
They are tie-in strongly with the activity of autonomic nervous system (orthosympathetic and sympathetic nervous
system) and they provide important information about automatic reactions to internal and external stimuli, these
reactions are non controlled by the willingness of person [Greenfield and Sternback, 1998; Boucsein and Ottmann,
1996].
Furthermore these indexes are quite easy to measure through not invasive methods without limit the job activity
[Fig. 1 e 2].
During the pilots, all the physiological registrations have had a standard duration: they were 4-8 hours long, according
the duration of job activities of each disable person.
The heart rate (HR) was measured by a bracelet (MoCas device) worn around the left wrist.
The sensor records the oscillations of blood flow (and therefore cardiac contractions) thanks to an IR source and to a photodetector placed on the wrist.
An evaluation of galvanic skin response (GSR) is made through a measure of skin conductance between two electrodes placed always on bracelet wrist level and it provides information about the activity of sweat glands, which reflects changes in the subject’s psycho-emotional status joint to the level of attention [W. Boucsein, 1992].
In the tables 1 and 2 are showed two typical signals of heart rate (HR) and skin impedance (GSR) registered during different pilots sessions.
Tabella 1 – HR Tabella 2 – GSR
