Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai, India.
Department of Nephrology, Saveetha Medical College & Hospital, Chennai, India.
Proc Inst Mech Eng H. 2023 Aug;237(8):919-927. doi: 10.1177/09544119231184113. Epub 2023 Jul 3.
Sympathetic innervation of the sweat gland (SG) manifests itself electrically as electrodermal activity (EDA), which can be utilized to measure sudomotor function. Since SG exhibits similarities in structure and function with kidneys, quantification of SG activity is attempted through EDA signals. A methodology is developed with electrical stimulation, sampling frequency and signal processing algorithm. One hundred twenty volunteers participated in this study belonging to controls, diabetes, diabetic nephropathy, and diabetic neuropathy. The magnitude and time duration of stimuli is arrived by trial and error in such a way it does not influence controls but triggers SG activity in other Groups. This methodology leads to a distinct EDA signal pattern with changes in frequency and amplitude. The continuous wavelet transform depicts a scalogram to retrieve this information. Further, to distinguish between Groups, time average spectrums are plotted and mean relative energy (MRE) is computed. Results demonstrate high energy value in controls, and it gradually decreases in other Groups indicating a decline in SG activity on diabetes prognosis. The correlation for the acquired results was determined to be 0.99 when compared to the standard lab procedure. Furthermore, Cohen's value, which is less than 0.25 for all Groups indicating the minimal effect size. Hence the obtained result is validated and statistically analyzed for individual variations. Thus this has the potential to get transformed into a device and could prevent diabetic kidney disease.
汗腺的交感神经支配在电生理上表现为皮肤电活动（EDA），可用于测量汗腺功能。由于汗腺在结构和功能上与肾脏相似，因此尝试通过 EDA 信号来量化汗腺活动。通过电刺激、采样频率和信号处理算法开发了一种方法。120 名志愿者参与了这项研究，分为对照组、糖尿病组、糖尿病肾病组和糖尿病神经病变组。通过反复试验确定刺激的幅度和持续时间，使其不会影响对照组，但会触发其他组的汗腺活动。这种方法会导致 EDA 信号模式发生明显变化，包括频率和幅度的变化。连续小波变换描绘了一个标度图来检索这些信息。此外，为了区分组间差异，绘制了时间平均频谱，并计算了平均相对能量（MRE）。结果表明，对照组的能量值较高，而在其他组中逐渐降低，表明随着糖尿病预后的发展，汗腺活动逐渐下降。与标准实验室程序相比，获得的结果的相关性为 0.99。此外，所有组的 Cohen's 值均小于 0.25，表明效应量较小。因此，对获得的结果进行了验证和统计学分析，以评估个体差异。因此，该方法具有转化为设备的潜力，并可能预防糖尿病肾病。
