Specialized wristbands, developed researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, can gauge a person’s emotional response to stimuli by tapping skin conductance, an indicator of the state of the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the body’s flight-or-fight response by ramping up responses such as heart rate and blood pressure. When downloaded and analyzed, a user’s levels of excitement, such as being at an amusement park, will register in the form of a red line spiking dramatically at times throughout the day. One surprise encountered during this study involved an enormous spike recorded by the wrist sensor just prior to an autistic boy suffering an epileptic seizure. They believe that the wrist sensors could help to shed light in the future on studies of sleep, epilepsy, and even depression.

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