A Deep Convolutional Autoencoder for Automatic Motion Artifact Removal in Electrodermal Activity Signals: A Preliminary Study

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 are feasible when data are corrupted with low magnitude artifacts. In this study, we propose a more data-driven deep convolutional autoencoder (DCAE) for automated motion artifact removal in EDA signals. The DCAE was trained using several publicly available datasets. We used both Gaussian white noise (GWN) and real-life induced MA data records collected in a laboratory setting to corrupt the clean EDA signals. We compared the performance of our DCAE network with three state-of-the-art methods using the performance metrics the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement (SNR <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">imp</inf> ), and the mean squared error (MSE). The proposed DCAE provided significantly higher SNR <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">imp</inf> and lower MSE compared to three other methods for both synthetically and real-life induced MA. While the work is preliminary, this work illustrates a promising approach which can potentially be used to remove many different types of MA.