Exploring emotional stimulation to better address BPSD: Analysis of heart rate variability, electrodermal activity, mood alterations and its ethical implications of in dementia care

Dementia is a growing problem and will continue to grow with the aging population, causing an increase in economic burden on the affected person, the family members and the society. In addition, the behavioral and psychological symptoms (BPSD) of dementia are causing additional burden on all the stakeholders. Mood can play a major role in stimulating the BPSD issues. Emotional stimulation techniques can be applied to influence the mood. The emotional stimulation phenomenon can be tracked and observed for further analysis in exploring the implications of emotions in ailments such as Alzheimer's, vascular dementia and more. This study investigates the variation of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Electrodermal activity (EDA) in response to emotional stimuli under an ethical lens. In this experiment, 26 people volunteered to participate and had their data collected for two phases; the baseline phase during which the participants were simply resting, and the emotional stimuli phase during which participants were shown emotionally evocative media. Time-domain and nonlinear analysis of HRV was then performed on the collected HRV data. Moreover, for analysis of EDA, it was decomposed into tonic and phasic components. This paper comprehensively covers the experimental protocol used, data analysis performed, the results obtained and the observations from the conducted study along with some of the ethical aspects. This study can help reduce the burden of the caregivers of people affected with dementia.