Quantitative ECG based emotion state recognition using Detrended Fluctuation Analysis

Abstract

Wearable emotion recogniton system is essential in identifying mental health disorders by early detection and continuous monitoring of human emotions to provide proper treatment care. Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals can be used for emotion recognition for its noninvasiveness and easy usability. In this study, Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) and Extreme Gradient Boost (XG Boost) classifier is used to classify the scary and boring emotion from the ECG signals. For this, ECG signal corresponding to these emotions are obtained from public database. The preprocessing is performed by adding the video IDs to the signal and annotating it. This preprocessed signal is subjected to DFA to understand the power-law correlations and similarity property. Further, from the power law correlations, features namely Hurst exponent and DFA intercept are extracted. These features are subjected to XG Boost classifier to differentiate the two emotions. Results shows that the log-log plot of power law correlation is linear in nature which indicates that ECG signals of both the emotions have long range correlations and self-similarity property. The extracted scaling exponent indicates variations between scary and boring with a mean and standard deviation of 0.81±0.13 and 0.68±0.07 respectively. Similarly, DFA intercept provides mean and standard deviation for scary and boring 0.15±0.06 and 0.17±0.07 respectively, showing less variability in the ECG signal. XG Boost classifier gives accuracy of 80.5% for classifying scary and boring emotion. Thus, the proposed approach can be used for wearable emotion recognition system to differentiate scary and boring emotion.