Electrodermal Activity and Sweat Rate Sensing Technologies for Occupational Health Monitoring: A Systematic Review

The human centered paradigm of the Industry 5.0 framework has boosted the demand of wearable sensing technologies able to monitor operators’ health, safety, and well-being. Among the most suitable physiological signals, Electrodermal Activity (EDA) and Sweat Rate (SR) stand up as suitable candidates for detecting conditions of stress, fatigue, and workload in occupational contexts. Despite sensing approaches for both EDA and SR have been widely investigated from both research and application perspectives, a limited comprehensive classification and analysis in terms of design, characterization protocols and performances can be highlighted. This systematic review aims to fill this gap analyzing the last decade of literature concerning the use of EDA and SR as tools to monitor operators. The analysis performed spans across applications, sensing technologies, testing protocols, signal processing, as well as multimodal integration. Each of these classes is deeply analyzed in order to compare information regarding both commercial devices and custom-built solutions, with particular attention to novel approaches exploiting flexible electronics, advanced materials, and microfluidics. Results obtained showed promising adoption in sectors such as construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and office work, with persistent challenges in terms of heterogeneous testing protocols, lack of standardized metrics for reliability and usability, motion artifacts, comfort, battery life, and user compliance. One of the major trends is represented by integration of EDA/SR with other biosignals—such as HRV, EEG, and skin temperature—enabling more robust and accurate detection of stress and emotional states through multimodal approaches. The discussion and conclusion of this review outlines current advances and identifies future directions to guide the development of user-centric, multimodal monitoring systems for occupational health.