Quantifying the Cardiovascular Response to Mental Stress Using a Compact Multimodal Wearable Sensing Patch

Acute psychological stress has a multifaceted impact on cardiovascular physiology, including increases in chronotropy, inotropy, and vascular tone. Chronic exposure to stress may greatly increase cardiovascular risk. To examine the cardiovascular impact of acute stress comprehensively, new multimodal portable monitoring solutions are needed. We examined the feasibility of using a compact multimodal wearable patch to measure laboratory-based stress-induced cardiovascular responses in a diverse sample with recent myocardial infarction (MI) and healthy participants (N = 37, 28 MI) during a protocol with a public-speaking stressor. Using the electrocardiogram, seismocardiogram, and photoplethysmogram captured from the device, we found several significant (p < 0.05) autonomic changes in the pooled sample suggesting stress activation: increases in heart rate, chest photoplethysmogram amplitude, and perfusion index and decreases in heart rate variability, left ventricular ejection time, pulse arrival time, and pulse transit time. We, thus, demonstrated that a single wearable device can capture stress-induced cardiovascular changes, enabling simultaneous examination of stress-induced inotropic, chronotropic, and vascular effects. This portable, wireless chest patch may be useful in comprehensively and unobtrusively examining stress-induced cardiovascular effects in-lab. Given the public health importance of psychological stress and cardiovascular disease, future studies should assess the device’s full clinical potential in larger groups with longer monitoring periods.