Hugo F Posada-Quintero

University of Connecticut | UConn · Department of Biomedical Engineering

Introduction This study investigated the differences between males and females in autonomic functions and cognitive performance during cold-air exposure and cold-water partial-immersion compared to a room temperature-air environment. Although several studies have investigated the effects of cold-air or cold-water exposures on autonomic function and...

Since breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, it is recommended that women over the age of 40 get annualmammogram screenings. Regular mammograms allow for early breast cancer detection, and in turn, proper treatment andimproved patient prognosis. However, the stress and discomfort associated with the mammogram procedure deter manywomen fr...

Since breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, it is recommended that women over the age of 40 get annual mammogram screenings. Regular mammograms allow for early breast cancer detection, and in turn, proper treatment and improved patient prognosis. However, the stress and discomfort associated with the mammogram procedure deter many women...

Regular mammograms are recommended for women to allow for early detection of breast cancer and in turn, proper treatment and improved prognosis of patients. However, the stress and discomfort associated with the procedure deter many women from routine screening. Most previous work attempting to characterize this pain utilizes subjective, questionna...

Researchers are increasingly using machine learning to study physiological markers of emotional experience. In the present work, we evaluated the promises and limitations of this approach via a big team science competition. Twelve teams of researchers competed to predict self-reported core affective experiences using a multi-modal set of peripheral...

Smart textile-based wearable sweat sensors have recently received a lot of attention due to their potential for use in personal medical monitoring. They have a variety of desirable qualities, including low cost, easy implementation, stretchability, flexibility, and light weight. Wearable sweat sensors are a potential approach for personalized medic...

The continuous detection of emotional states has many applications in mental health, marketing, human-computer interaction, and assistive robotics. Electrodermal activity (EDA), a signal modulated by sympathetic nervous system activity, provides continuous insight into emotional states. However, EDA possesses intricate nonstationary and nonlinear c...

Regular mammograms are recommended for women to allow for early detection ofbreast cancer and in turn, proper treatment and improved prognosis of patients. How-ever, the stress and discomfort associated with the procedure deter many women fromroutine screening. Most previous work attempting to characterize this pain utilizes sub-jective, questionna...

Detection of emotional states plays a prominent role in affective computing, decision-making, and healthcare. Physiological signals are an ideal target for continuous and objective assessment of emotional states. Electrodermal activity (EDA) is considered one of the most effective and widely used markers of sympathetic activation. However, emotiona...

Purpose Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are conditions that similarly alter cognitive functioning ability and challenge the social interaction, attention, and communication skills of affected individuals. Yet these are distinct neurological conditions that can exhibit diverse characteristics which...

This study investigated the impact of auditory stimuli on muscular activation patterns using wearable surface electromyography (EMG) sensors. Employing four key muscles (Sternocleidomastoid Muscle (SCM), Cervical Erector Muscle (CEM), Quadricep Muscles (QMs), and Tibialis Muscle (TM)) and time domain features, we differentiated the effects of four...

Emotions play an essential role in human life as they are linked to well-being and markers of various diseases. Physiological signals can be used to assess emotions objectively and continuously. Electrodermal activity (EDA) is particularly interesting to assess emotions due to its relationship with the sympathetic nervous system. EDA signals are co...

Climate change caused by anthropogenic environmental pollution has become one of the most pressing issues of our modern world. For instance, heat waves have been shown to seriously impair students’ health and productivity (Lala & Hagishima, 2023). The general problem of climate change has influenced recent research to focus on redesigning and restr...

Epilepsy is a complex neurological disorder characterized by recurrent and unpredictable seizures that affect millions of people around the world. Early and accurate epilepsy detection is critical for timely medical intervention and improved patient outcomes. Several methods and classifiers for automated epilepsy detection have been developed in pr...

p>The continuous detection of emotional states has many applications in mental health, marketing, human-computer interaction, and assistive robotics. Electrodermal activity (EDA), a signal modulated by sympathetic nervous system activity, provides continuous insight into emotional states. However, EDA possesses intricate nonstationary and nonlinear...

The detection of emotions has a wide range of applications in psychology, marketing, and human-computer interaction. The detection of emotional states using biomedical signals is attractive because it is non-invasive and there is a large body of knowledge in digital signal processing that can be applied to the analysis of these signals. Additionall...

Sleep deprivation, a widespread phenomenon that affects one-third of normal American adults, induces adverse changes in physical and cognitive performance, which in turn increases the occurrence of accidents. Sleep deprivation is known to increase resting blood pressure and decrease muscle sympathetic nerve activity. Monitoring changes in the inter...

The current method for assessing pain in clinical practice is subjective and relies on self-reported scales. An objective and accurate method of pain assessment is needed for physicians to prescribe the proper medication dosage, which could reduce addiction to opioids. Hence, many works have used electrodermal activity (EDA) as a suitable signal fo...

Background: The electroretinogram is a clinical test used to assess the function of the photoreceptors and retinal circuits of various cells in the eye, with the recorded waveform being the result of the summated response of neural generators across the retina. Methods: The present investigation involved an analysis of the electroretinogram wave...

Background: The electroretinogram is a clinical test used to assess the function of the photoreceptors and retinal circuits of various cells in the eye, with the recorded waveform being the result of the summated response of neural generators across the retina. Methods: The present investigation involved an analysis of the electroretinogram wavefor...

Data visualization is critical to unraveling hidden information from complex and high-dimensional data. Interpretable visualization methods are critical, especially in the biology and medical fields, however, there are limited effective visualization methods for large genetic data. Current visualization methods are limited to lower-dimensional data...

Background: The electroretinogram is a clinical test used to assess the function of the photoreceptors and retinal circuits of various cells in the eye, with the recorded waveform being the result of the summated response of neural generators across the retina. Methods: The present investigation involved an analysis of the electroretinogram wavefor...

Accurate prediction of cardiovascular disease (CVD) requires multifaceted information consisting of not only a patient’s medical history, but genomic data, symptoms, lifestyle, and risk factors which are often not incorporated into a decision making process as the data are vast, difficult to obtain, and require complex algorithms. However, given th...

Dental pain invokes the sympathetic nervous system, which can be measured by electrodermal activity (EDA). In the dental clinic, accurate quantification of pain is needed because it could enable optimized drug-dose treatments, thereby potentially reducing drug addiction. However, a confounding factor is that during pain there is also lingering resi...

The continuous monitoring of stress, pain, and discomfort is key to providing a good quality of life for horses. The available tools based on observation are subjective and do not allow continuous monitoring. Given the link between emotions and sympathetic autonomic arousal, heart rate and heart rate variability are widely used for the non-invasive...

Bio-signals are being increasingly used for the assessment of pathophysiological conditions including pain, stress, fatigue, and anxiety. For some approaches, a single signal is not sufficient to provide a comprehensive diagnosis; however, there is a growing consensus that multimodal approaches allow higher sensitivity and specificity. For instance...

Aims: To explore whether electrodermal activity (EDA) can serve as a complementary tool for pulpal diagnosis (Aim 1) and an objective metric to assess dental pain before and after local anaesthesia (Aim 2). Methodology: A total of 53 subjects (189 teeth) and 14 subjects (14 teeth) were recruited for Aim 1 and Aim 2, respectively. We recorded EDA...

Measuring pain objectively, namely, based on physiological signals instead of self-reported measures, would be highly valuable for better treating people with chronic pain. The subjectivity of the gold standard to quantify pain, which is based upon subjects' self-reported assessment using numerical or visual scales, makes pain management extremely...

Automatic motion artifact (MA) removal in electrodermal activity (EDA) signals is a major challenge because of the aperiodic and irregular characteristics of EDA. Given the lack of a suitable MA removal algorithm, a substantial amount of EDA data is typically discarded, especially during ambulatory monitoring. Current methods for MA removal in EDA...

Appropriate prescription of pain medication is challenging because pain is difficult to quantify due to the subjectiveness of pain assessment. Currently, clinicians must entirely rely on pain scales based on patients' assessments. This has been alleged to be one of the causes of drug overdose and addiction, and a contributor to the opioid crisis. T...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition that impacts language, communication and social interactions. The current diagnostic process for ASD is based upon a detailed multidisciplinary assessment. Currently no clinical biomarker exists to help in the diagnosis and monitoring of this condition that has a prevalence of approxi...

Objective: This study aimed to develop a robust and data driven automatic motion artifacts (MA) removal technique from electrodermal activity (EDA) signal. Methods: we proposed a deep convolutional autoencoder (DCAE) approach for automatic MA removal in EDA signals. Our model was trained using several publicly available datasets that were collec...

The most traditional sites for electrodermal activity (EDA) data collection, palmar locations such as fingers or palms, are not usually recommended for ambulatory monitoring given that subjects have to use their hands regularly during their daily activities, and therefore, alternative sites are often sought for EDA data collection. In this study, w...

Background and objective Electrodermal activity (EDA) has gained popularity in recent years for diverse applications such as emotion and stress recognition; assessment of pain, fatigue, and sleepiness; and diagnosis of depression and epilepsy. However, presence of motion artifacts (MA) hinders accurate analysis of EDA signals. This study presents a...

Acute sleep deprivation is a common workplace and lifestyle hazard known to affect physiological and cognitive performance. Previous research emphasizes the effect that sleep deprivation has on cognitive performance and often correlates changes in physiological parameters to measured performance. One potential problem with this approach is that the...

Diabetes distal symmetrical peripheral neuropathy (DSPN) is the most prevalent form of neuropathy in industrialized countries, substantially increasing risk for morbidity and pre-mature mortality. DSPN may manifest with small-fiber disease, large-fiber disease, or a combination of both. This review summarizes: (1) DSPN subtypes (small- and large-fi...

Hyperbaric oxygen (HBO2) is breathed during undersea operations and in hyperbaric medicine. However, breathing HBO2 by divers and patients increases the risk of central nervous system oxygen toxicity (CNS-OT), which ultimately manifests as sympathetic stimulation producing tachycardia and hypertension, hyperventilation, and ultimately generalized s...

Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB) simulates realistic and complex aviation-related tasks a pilot routinely performs during flight. However, past studies using MATB have been unable to consistently elicit the effects of performance degradation during prolonged wakefulness. We surmise that this is because the task difficulty level of the MATB softw...

Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is responsible for a large part of healthcare costs every year, but susceptibility to it is affected by complex biological and physiological variables including patients' genetics and lifestyles. There has not been much work to develop a framework that incorporates these important and clinically relevant risk factors in...

Objectives: an evaluation of Principal Dynamic Mode (PDM) and Orthogonal Subspace Projection (OSP) methods to characterize the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) response in three different hyperbaric environments was performed. Methods: ECG signals were recorded in two different stages (baseline and immersion) in three different hyperbaric environm...

Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is responsible for a large part of healthcare costs every year, but susceptibility to it is affected by complex biological and physiological variables including patients' genetics and lifestyles. There has not been much work to develop a framework that incorporates these important and clinically relevant risk factors in...

Electrodermal activity (EDA) has been found to be a highly sensitive, accurate and non-invasive measure of the sympathetic nervous system's activity and has been used to extract biomarkers of various pathophysiological conditions including stress, fatigue, epilepsy, and chronic pain. Recently, various robust signal processing techniques have been d...

The most effective method to mitigate decompression sickness in divers is hyperbaric oxygen (HBO2) pre-breathing. However, divers breathing HBO2 are at risk for developing central nervous system oxygen toxicity (CNS-OT), which can manifest as symptoms that might impair a diver's performance, or cause more serious symptoms like seizures. In this stu...

The electrodermal activity (EDA) signal is a sensitive and non-invasive surrogate measure of sympathetic function. Use of EDA has increased in popularity in recent years for such applications as emotion and stress recognition; assessment of pain, fatigue, and sleepiness; diagnosis of depression and epilepsy; and other uses. Recently, there have bee...

Objective pain quantification is an important but difficult goal. Electrodermal activity (EDA) has been widely explored for this purpose, given its reported sensitivity to pain. However, cognitive stress can hinder successful estimation of physical pain when using EDA signals. We collected EDA signals from ten subjects (5 male and 5 female) undergo...

The electrodermal activity (EDA) signal is a sensitive and non-invasive surrogate measure of sympathetic function. Use of EDA has increased in popularity in recent years for such applications as emotion and stress recognition; assessment of pain, fatigue, and sleepiness; diagnosis of depression and epilepsy; and other uses. Recently, there have bee...

We performed machine learning for text-independent speaker identification using speech recorded during the day, evening, and night, from subjects undergoing 25 hours of prolonged wakefulness. Subjects answered casual questions lasting approximately 3 minutes and described pictures presented to them for 0.5 minutes. We extracted 12,515 vocal feature...

An objective measure of pain remains an unmet need of people with chronic pain, estimated to be 1/3 of the adult population in the US. The current gold standard to quantify pain is highly subjective, based upon self-reporting with numerical or visual analog scales (VAS). This subjectivity complicates pain management and exacerbates the epidemic of...

The subjectiveness of pain can lead to inaccurate prescribing of pain medication, which can exacerbate drug addiction and overdose. Given that pain is often experienced in patients’ homes, there is an urgent need for ambulatory devices that can quantify pain in real-time. We implemented three time- and frequency-domain electrodermal activity (EDA)...

Objective: Electrodermal activity (EDA) has been widely used to assess human response to stressful stimuli, including pain. Recently, spectral analysis of EDA has been found to be more sensitive and reproducible for assessment of sympathetic arousal than traditional indices (e.g., tonic and phasic components). However, none of the aforementioned a...

We have performed a direct comparison between facial features obtained from a webcam and vigilance-task performance during prolonged wakefulness. Prolonged wakefulness deteriorates working performance due to changes in cognition, emotion, and by delayed response. Facial features can be potentially collected everywhere using webcams located in the w...

BACKGROUND The subjectiveness of pain leads to inaccurate pain management, which can exacerbate drug addiction and overdose. The consequence is tremendous cost to society and individuals as the opioid crisis grows. Given that pain is often experienced in patients’ homes, there is an urgent need for ambulatory devices that can quantify pain in real...

Vocalizations from birds are a fruitful source of information for the classification of species. However, currently used analyses are ineffective to determine the taxonomic status of some groups. To provide a clearer grouping of taxa for such bird species from the analysis of vocalizations, more sensitive techniques are required. In this study, we...

Herein, screen printed electrodes prepared from commercially available conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):polystyrene sulfonate have been shown to record simultaneous electromyogram (EMG), electrocardiogram (ECG), and electrodermal activity (EDA) from a spandex t-shirt sleeve in dry state. Secondly, electrodes printed on an arm sle...

We have tested the feasibility of thermal grills, a harmless method to induce pain. The thermal grills consist of interlaced tubes that are set at cool or warm temperatures creating a painful "illusion" (no tissue injure is caused) in the brain when the cool and warm stimuli are presented collectively. Advance in objective pain assessment research...

We developed an objective real-time pain detection method using a smartphone and a wrist-worn wearable device to collect electrodermal activity (EDA) signals. Recently, various researchers have developed pain management applications. However, they rely on subjective self-reported pain scores or the video camera of a smartphone to detect pain, but t...

Introduction The Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory (NSMRL) is developing predictive models to examine how non-invasive, non-disruptive physiological monitoring can be used to track performance decrements due to sleep deficiency. Utilizing biometrics extracted from physiological measures to track performance changes would allow for automat...

High risk professions, such as pilots, police officers, and TSA agents, require sustained vigilance over long periods of time and/or under conditions of little sleep. This can lead to performance impairment in occupational tasks. Predicting impaired states before performance decrement manifests is critical to prevent costly and damaging mistakes. W...

In 2002, the Colombian ministry of education released statute 1278, for teaching professionalization, superseding statute 2277 of 1977. Although statute 1278 was intended to increase the quality of the education service and teachers’ remuneration, there is evidence that the abundant evaluations and hindered promotion system introduced by statute 12...

BACKGROUND Clinically, the most important signs and symptoms of acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF) relate to accumulation of excess body fluid, but autonomic dysregulation is another characteristic feature of ADHF physiology. Transthoracic bioimpedance (TBI) is a non-invasive, simple method for measuring fluid retention in lungs. Heart rate v...

Background: Accumulation of excess body fluid and autonomic dysregulation are clinically important characteristics of acute decompensated heart failure. We hypothesized that transthoracic bioimpedance, a noninvasive, simple method for measuring fluid retention in lungs, and heart rate variability, an assessment of autonomic function, can be used f...

The electrodermal activity (EDA) signal is an electrical manifestation of the sympathetic innervation of the sweat glands. EDA has a history in psychophysiological (including emotional or cognitive stress) research since 1879, but it was not until recent years that researchers began using EDA for pathophysiological applications like the assessment...

The feasibility of detecting mild dehydration by using autonomic responses to cognitive stress was studied. To induce cognitive stress, subjects (n = 17) performed the Stroop task, which comprised four minutes of rest and four minutes of test. Nine indices of autonomic control based on electrodermal activity (EDA) and pulse rate variability (PRV) w...

We studied the correlation between oscillatory brain activity and performance in healthy subjects performing the error awareness task (EAT) every 2 h, for 24 h. In the EAT, subjects were shown on a screen the names of colors and were asked to press a key if the name of the color and the color it was shown in matched, and the screen was not a duplic...