GSR

Galvanic Skin Response

Resource
Guide
Table of Contents
Introduction........................................................................3
GSR and The Autonomic Nervous System......................... 3
The Beginnings of GSR..................................................... 4
Human Skin and Stimuli......................................................5
The Job of Human Skin.................................................... 5
Enter The Stimulus.......................................................... 6
Electricity: How the Body Speaks....................................... 7
Your Body Works With Electrical Precision....................... 7
Sweat and The Electrical Levels In Your Body................... 7
GSR Scanner Readings........................................................9
How GSR Scanners Read.................................................. 9
What GSR Scanners Read................................................ 9
GSR Data Interpretation..................................................10
The iTOVi Scanner and GSR............................................... 10
iTOVi’s Unique Approach To GSR Stimulus.......................10
The iTOVi Scan Report.....................................................11
Conclusion......................................................................... 12
Sources............................................................................. 13
INTRODUCTION
Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) measures changes in elec-
trodermal activity (EDA) in response to specific stimuli. Whatever stimulus you are testing
with, your body’s electrical response
So...what does that mean? To understand GSR, we first
can be affected by bodily conditions.
need to understand a few things about the human body.

Your scan can be affected by your:

GSR and The Autonomic Heart Rate
Nervous System Emotional Intensity
So much of what the body does is autonomic. Your Body Temperature
body digests food, regulates your temperature, and Current State of Health
repairs both internal and external damage without
Hormones
your conscious effort.
Stress Level
Autonomic: involuntary or unconscious; Medications
relating to the autonomic nervous system. And other factors

It’s nice that our bodies will do work for us without us

having to micromanage everything, but the autonomic
functions of the body can also be confusing. your body can feel like you’re talking to an infant: “I
know you’re crying, but why? What is bothering you?”
Ever wondered what your body was trying to tell you
with a headache, a mood swing, an increased heart rate, Unfortunately, the autonomic nervous system doesn’t
or any other symptom? The trouble is, trying to read speak English or any other human language. The tech-

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 nology to read your autonomic system doesn’t yet ex-
ist. But GSR manages to give us a little glimpse into There are 7,000,000,
the unconscious mechanisms of the human body.
000,000,000,000,00
The Beginnings of GSR 0,000,000 (7 octillion)
atoms in the average
In 1888, French neurologist Charles Féré discovered
that “by passing a small electrical current across
two electrodes placed on the surface of the skin, one
could measure momentary decreases in skin resis- human body. Each one
tance in response to a variety of stimuli” (Dawson).
contains positive
Basically, Féré found that he could introduce a stim-
ulus to an individual and measure their body’s au- and negative
tonomic electrical response to that stimulus. And it
could be done almost instantaneously because elec-
tricity in the body travels fast.
electrical
Measuring changes in electrodermal activity even-
charges.
tually led to the invention of many GSR (Galvanic
Skin Response) technologies. For decades, GSR has

been used to tap into the human subconscious and

autonomic systems.

GSR Since The 19th Century

From the polygraph in the 1920s to modern bio-
feedback devices like the Microsoft Band and Jaw-
bone Up, GSR technology has been used for almost
a century. It has found applications in psychology,
psychotherapy, clinical studies, neuroscience, and
even dentistry.

Want to know more about the sciences (electrical

and biological) behind GSR technology? This re-
source page will break it down for you (in words,
not electrical signatures).

We’ll cover:
• Skin conductivity
• GSR measurement methods
• How iTOVi uses GSR

So, take a good whiff of rosemary or peppermint

to help you focus, because we’ve got a lot of ground
to cover.

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HUMAN SKIN AND STIMULI
The Job of Human Skin
First, we need to understand our skin a little bit better.

Your skin does much more than keep your outsides in. The skin on your hands especially does more than
let you tell the difference between velvet and sandpaper.

Human skin, in addition to performing its sensory role, connects to the body’s immune system and thermo-
regulation system. Your skin is your largest organ and helps take care of your other organs by maintaining
a safe, functional environment for them.

What we’re saying is that your skin has a lot of work to do. And to get all that work done, your skin works
with both your somatic nervous system (all the things you consciously control) and your autonomic ner-
vous system (everything that your body does on its own).

Somatic A part of your peripheral nervous system, including your sensory

nerves and motor nerves. If you can consciously control it, it is
Nervous part of your somatic nervous system.
System

Autonomic A part of the peripheral nervous system that regulates bodily

functions (such as heart rate, digestion, pupillary response, etc.)
Nervous without your conscious effort.
System

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 When your body is introduced to any kind of stim- Whether the stimulus is tactile, auditory, visual, or
ulus, your skin responds—triggering and mani- olfactory, there will almost always be some auto-
festing both conscious and unconscious reactions. nomic reaction in the skin.

And that’s just as it should be. Of course, some stimuli have little effect,
while other stimuli have a marked effect.
As the middleman between you and
the outside world, your skin needs One man gets goosebumps at the sight
to be like a good, reliable of a spider while another man is unaf-
employee who does Pore fected. The scent of peanut butter will
register very differently on the skin of
Epidermis someone who has a peanut allergy than it
will on the skin of someone who doesn’t.

The emotional and physical intensity of

Dermis any single stimulus will be different from
person to person, depending on their body,
their mind, and other variables.
Hypodermis
This individualization isn’t an obstacle; it is
precisely what GSR technology is all about.
their job without
constant supervision. Sweat Gland GSR’s job is to read the autonomic respons-
es in your skin as it reacts according to the
For example, your skin allows you intensity of the stimulus’s effect on you.
to feel and recognize if the air around you is too GSR’s method for measuring that intensity is the
cold. You can consciously choose to put on a sweat- electrodermal activity in your skin.
er, but your body will begin to regulate its own tem-
perature by shivering and raising goosebumps—
whether you decide to put on a sweater or not. Are İTOVİ Scanners More
Reliable Than Polygraphs?
If you come across a particularly intense emotion-
al stimulus, your skin will respond by activating The polygraph you are thinking of probably
some of the millions of sweat glands on your hands, monitored heart rate, respiratory rate, and
feet, and face. Your skin may well know that you electrodermal activity.
are intensely emotional before you do.
Polygraphs were once considered to be reliable
These autonomic reactions go deeper than the first “lie detectors”, but these monitoring devices were
layer known as the epidermis. The sweat glands that only capable of measuring the quantity of the
get autonomically activated are down two levels physiological response, not the quality.
deeper in the hypodermis of your skin. So the skin A suspect’s heart rate could increase because
will get all its layers involved to respond to stimuli. they were lying or simply because they feared a
false conviction. We simply don’t know enough
yet about the systematic psychology of deception
Enter The Stimulus to be able to build a truly reliable “lie detector.”
With GSR technology, there is always a stimulus.
With polygraphs, the stimulus is the mental and iTOVi’s scanners and reports give you the
bodily stress of lying. Some psychotherapists use quantity reports, but we leave the why to you. You
images relating to their patient’s trauma or phobia know better than we do if your body responded to
as a stimulus. Cedarwood for an emotional or a physical reason.

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ELECTRICITY: HOW THE BODY SPEAKS
Your Body Works With autonomic, like the beating of your heart, are con-
Electrical Precision trolled by electricity running through your body.

Have you ever observed your fingers typing away

on a keyboard, and wondered, “How does my brain Sweat and The Electrical
communicate with my fingers so fast? How is it that Levels In Your Body
I can move so quickly and precisely?”
Of course, the body can also be pretty electric-re-
The answer is electricity. sistant and will only communicate within a certain
range of voltages.
Your body conducts electricity (think of the last time
you gave someone a small electric shock through skin The voltage of the electrical signals in your body
contact) and it communicates through electricity. is largely limited by the body’s Tonic Skin Con-
ductance Level (SCL). In the tonic level, the energy
Electrical signals run from your brain to anywhere in never increases or decreases very quickly. So there
your body and back again as fast as, well, lightning. isn’t much for GSR scanners to read into there.

Without these electrical currents, you wouldn’t Something happens, though, when your body is in-
move, think, or feel. All functions, sympathetic and troduced to an intense stimulus—your sweat glands

Electrical speed:
Did you know that an electrical signature in your body can
move faster than 100 meters per second? No wonder you
can play whack-a-mole so well!

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 activate autonomically. The more pronounced mentarily. This is what causes the spikes in the
the stimulus’s effect on you, the more your sweat voltage readings. GSR technology measures these
glands will activate, increasing the conductivity of voltage spikes to infer just how much a stimulus
your skin. has affected you.

When the conductivity of your skin increases, we As soon as your body adjusts to the stimulus, those
get something called Phasic Skin Conductance sweat glands will deactivate, and the voltage of
Response (SCR). SCR is when electrical currents those phasic responses will go back down. But, as
ride on top of tonic level changes and show swift soon as there is another intense stimulus, the pha-
voltage alterations. sic reaction will spike again.

Ergo, the stronger the simulant’s effect on you, the In summary, GSR uses your body’s instant and sub-
more conductive your skin becomes and the greater conscious increases in skin conductivity to mea-
the voltage change. sure your body’s response to stimuli.

The increase of sweat gland activity changes the But how can GSR scanners measure these voltage
ionic balance through which your body’s electri- changes? And then, how can these readings be
cal signatures flow. This change in ionic balance interpreted effectively?
decreases the resistance in your skin, if only mo-

1.5

1.0
GSR amplitude (uS)

0.5

0
00:00 00:30 01:00 01:30
Time (mm:ss)

Phasic Skin Conductance Response (SCR)

Tonic Skin Conductance Level (SCL)
GSR Peaks

Fig. 1. Tonic and Phasic responses from: iMotions “Galvanic Skin Response (GSR): The Complete Pocket Guide.” 2017, p. 22.

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GSR SCANNER READINGS
How GSR Scanners Read Because there are more sweat glands in the skin of
First, to measure the voltage, GSR uses two elec- your palms than most other areas of your body, it’s an
trodes. They are placed some distance apart on optimal place to monitor electrodermal activity. Of-
your skin, usually on the hand. ten, the non-dominant hand is preferred since exces-
sive movement can throw off the Scanner’s readings.
iTOVi chose white trivalent chromium for our
GSR electrodes because it is both safe for human When voltage spikes in the phasic response occur,
contact and conductive enough to measure the the current of that voltage passes through your
phasic responses. skin (faster than any human could possibly track)
and the two electrodes measure the current that is
passed between them.

GSR Electrodes
What GSR Scanners Read
The GSR scanner can measure the latency, peak
amplitudes, rise times, and recovery time of every
voltage spike. And all of these values can be used to
read how much, and for how long, different stimuli
affect you.

The current can change in less than a second, but

modern GSR scanners can take more than a hun-
dred readings per second.

All of the electrical data that the GSR scanner picks

up is then imported via wires or Bluetooth, so the

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 information is transferred almost instantaneously and be studied manually. However, it is much fast-
to whichever server, program, or algorithm that er to feed the GSR data into an algorithm that will
will be used to interpret the data. pick out and quantify the information that is rele-
vant to the present experiment.
This way, stimuli can be given and electrodermal
responses recorded in fast succession. The GSR Developers will orient their analyzing algorithm to
electrodes will pick up every little change in the extract the data they are most interested in, whether
phasic reactions and the algorithm will be ready to that be the frequency of voltage spikes, the amplitude
interpret the data. of significant peaks, the latency period between par-
ticular intervals, or any other targeted information.

GSR Data Interpretation So now we’ve covered GSR scanners in gener-

Wait! What was that about algorithms? al—how does iTOVi use the GSR scanner? What
are our stimuli? And what information does our
All the data the GSR scanner picks up could be algorithm prioritize?
stored on a graph, like the polygraphs of the 1930s,

THE ITOVI SCANNER AND GSR

iTOVi’s Unique Approach To Electricity can be used to measure a person’s au-
tonomic response to a particular stimulus very
GSR Stimulus quickly. But what if the stimuli could be delivered
iTOVi developers decided there was more to be through electricity as well?
explored with the human body and electricity
than most GSR scanners were using. Rather than take one essential oil product at a time
and use it as a stimulus (that would take quite a while),

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 iTOVi developers decided to present each product, The iTOVi Scan Report
not in oil form, but through their frequencies. The iTOVi algorithm takes all the data that the iTOVi
scanner picks up and analyzes it, detecting which fre-
Each essential oil product has a unique electrical quencies your body had the strongest reaction to.
frequency that can be imitated through radio fre-
quencies. And iTOVi uses those radio frequencies Thanks to this algorithm, your scan report will
as stimuli for a GSR scan. show you an ordered list of the essential oils or sup-
plements that you currently (no, that was not a pun)
Sending a frequency that is identical to the frequency respond to.
for, say, Turmeric to the body is like giving the body
the quickest, tiniest dose of Turmeric imaginable. Or But that is not all the algorithm can do. Due to the
at least that is what the skin believes is happening. plethora of information within the essential oil
community, the iTOVi algorithm also sorts the oils
The scanner sends that frequency into the body and according to the physical or emotional system they
can immediately pick up the body’s autonomic re- are associated with.
sponse to it. The amplitude of the phasic response to
the Turmeric frequency can act as a measure of how In short, you get to see which oils your body re-
responsive this individual would be to Turmeric in sponds to most and you get to see which oils are
oil form. a viable option in any of the listed emotional or
physical categories.
Since electricity moves so fast—GSR scanners can
record samples quickly. In less than two minutes, (Psst, if you want help with your respiratory system,
the iTOVi Scanner can send you the frequencies for and the scan report displayed four different respira-
more than a hundred products, measure, and record tory system oils—you could choose the cheapest one.
your response to all of them. Talk about efficiency! Or the nicest-smelling one.)

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CONCLUSION
GSR scanners use the resistance properties in your But you don’t have to wait. Your very first scan will
skin to measure your response to different stimu- give you a starting point in creating a wellness plan
li. Since electrodermal activity is autonomic, GSR for yourself or for whomever you scan.
readings can provide valuable insights into how
your body works and interacts with the world Although the iTOVi scanner is not a diagnostic tool,
around it. it is fascinating to see how it has helped thousands
of people find essential oils that benefit them.
In conjunction with essential oil companies, the
iTOVi scanner offers people a tool they can use to be We look forward to seeing further developments
more proactive about their own wellness. So they with GSR technology, electrical-pulse stimulus,
can get an idea for which essential oils their body and essential oils, so we can study our bodies on a
responds to most. deeper level and treat them better.

Those who scan regularly (iTOVi does not recom-

mend scanning yourself more than once a day) will
get a sense for which products their body responds
to most strongly and most consistently, as opposed
to which oils their body has a transient response to.

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