Seamus Thomson
Seamus Thomson is a Senior Research Scientist at Google, Mountain View, CA, where his research interests include consumer health, wearables, and advanced sensing technologies. He was previously a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA’s Ames Research Center, focusing on science instrumentation for planetary exploration and life-detection missions to the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. He received the B.E. (Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at the University of Sydney, where he also earned the B.Med.Sc. degree from the Faculty of Medicine and Health.
Authored Publications
Sort By
Evidence of Differences in Diurnal Electrodermal Patterns by Mental Health Status in Free-Living Data
Daniel McDuff
Isaac Galatzer-Levy
Andrew Barakat
Conor Heneghan
Samy Abdel-Ghaffar
Jake Sunshine
Lindsey Sunden
Allen Jiang
Ari Winbush
Benjamin Nelson
Nicholas Allen
medRxiv (2024)
Preview abstract
Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a standardized measure of sympathetic arousal that has been linked to depression in laboratory experiments. However, the inability to measure EDA passively over time and in the real-world has limited conclusions that can be drawn about EDA as an indicator of mental health status outside of a controlled setting. Recent smartwatches have begun to incorporate wrist-worn continuous EDA sensors that enable longitudinal measurement in every-day life. This work presents the first example of passively collected, diurnal variations in EDA present in people with depression, anxiety and perceived stress. Subjects who were depressed had higher tonic EDA and heart rate, despite not engaging in greater physical activity, compared to those that were not depressed. EDA measurements showed differences between groups that were most prominent during the early morning. We did not observe amplitude or phase differences in the diurnal patterns.
View details
