Electrodermal Mapping of Sympathetic Activation Following Sleep Arousal Onset

Sleep arousals trigger rapid autonomic shifts, yet their specific sympathetic signatures remain poorly characterized due to the mixed sympathetic-parasympathetic nature of traditional cardiovascular markers. Electrodermal activity (EDA), driven exclusively by sympathetic sudomotor pathways, offers a more direct opportunity to characterize arousal-related autonomic responses during sleep. This study quantifies the evolution of EDA-based features associated with arousal events in 100 adults using polysomnography and high-resolution EDA recordings. We implemented a time-varying frequency decomposition framework to isolate sleep-specific sympathetic components, extracting statistical and peak-based features from arousal segments and matched stable-sleep controls. Compared to controls, arousal segments exhibited robust sympathetic modulation in EDA persisting 40 seconds post-arousal. While long arousals produced robust responses, short arousals showed negligible sudomotor responses. REM and NREM sleep showed consistent feature trajectories, with greater variability during REM. The observed activation is primarily driven by clustered sympathetic bursts and amplitude enhancement rather than shifts in peak frequency. These findings establish EDA as a highly sensitive marker of sleep-related autonomic activation and provide a quantitative baseline for characterizing sympathetic responses to sleep arousals.