On the deconvolution analysis of electrodermal activity in bipolar patients

People affected by bipolar disorders experience alternating states of depression with episodes of mania or hypomania. This mental can lead to a poor handling of daily routines, can worsen personal relationships, and often can be life-threatening. This preliminary study aims at investigating how the autonomic nervous system, in terms of electrodermal activity, responds to specific controlled emotional stimuli in bipolar patients. More specifically, we present here a method to deploy the analysis of ElectroDermal Activity (EDA) to discriminate clinical mood states. EDA was analyzed by using a deconvolution method to separate tonic from phasic components. The three subjects recruited and the experimental protocol used here is part of the European project PSYCHE. Preliminary results show that the bipolar mood states can be related to electrodermal tonic activity.