Short-term Impact of Polarity Therapy on Physiological Signals in Chronic Anxiety Patients

Increasing interest in complementary therapies prompts analysis of the objective impact on human physiology. Polarity Therapy (PT) is a branch of complementary medicine that relates to energy field therapies. Although previous clinical work has provided evidence of the impact on patients, the present work analyzes, for the first time, a short-term systematic investigation of such therapy. Several physiological signals were collected from 25 consecutive chronic anxiety patients seen in an outpatient clinic before and after PT, which included electrocardiographic analysis (ECG), galvanic skin response (GSR), blood volume pulse (BVP), and temperature. Also included was the analysis of facial expressions using state of the art deep learning-based models for automatic valence and arousal estimations. Using the recorded samples, we proceeded to calculate heart rate variability (HRV) analysis in a temporal, frequency and non-linear domain, which proves assessment of the autonomous nervous system. Fine analysis of the ECG was developed using wavelet-based techniques. The area under the T wave, recently described to correlate with electromagnetic ventricular activity, was also calculated. A psychological questionnaire assessed the clinical therapeutic impact before and after the session. Results revealed a positive impact of 30-minute therapy on blood pressure and heart rate reduction, direct evidence of down-regulation of sympathetic activity and up-regulation of parasympathetic activity, an inverse correlation of T-wave and BVP, which suggests improved cardiac coherence, and changes in facial expression which correlated with subjective perceptions of wellbeing. The combination of physiological variables, facial expression and self-assessment of wellbeing before and after a PT session revealed parallelism between the observed changes in physiological data and subjective feelings.