Identifying a cross-correlation between heart rate variability and skin conductance using pain intensity on healthy college students

Abstract

Chronic pain affects approximately 100 million Americans annually. Heart rate variability and skin conductance have been used separately as measures of pain intensity. Current methods of assessing pain intensity have some limitations as they completely rely on subjective pain scales, require the patient's cooperation, and completely fail in unconscious patients. Therefore, there is a need for an objective method of measuring pain to improve the quality of pain management. Understanding the relationship between heart rate variability and skin conductance can be beneficial for non-pharmacological treatments of pain such as biofeedback training, as combining both signals can be used to create a more powerful tool to measure pain. To identify a relationship between skin conductance and heart rate variability, we propose a cross-correlation analysis. Such approach necessitates collection of baseline data on healthy college students, administration of a thermal stimuli, and collection of data during and after the stimuli.