Cardiovascular Changes Induced by Acute Emotional Stress Estimated from the Pulse Transit Time Difference

Abstract

In the present work, the difference between arrival times of photoplethysmographic (PPG) pulses from two differ- ent sites of the arterial tree (PTTD) is calculated. As the PTTD is considered to be related with arterial pulse wave velocity, an evaluation of it’s usefulness to identify states of acute mental stress is performed. A subset of fourteen healthy volunteers undergoing a stress protocol was anal- ysed and a statistical test was carried out to evaluate the validity of the proposed method. The results showed that the standard deviation of the PTTD had sufficient statisti- cal capacity to discern between states of stress and relax- ation. Furthermore, a generalised descending trend ofthe mean PTTD can be seen from relaxation to stress.