Pulse diagnosis (wrist pulse signal) is a well-known traditional technique used for a health examination. It has the potential to detect cardiac and non-cardiac diseases.

A study was conducted to investigate human emotions using wrist pulse signal assessment. The aim was to categorize anxiety, boredom, physical pain, and reference state by processing and analysis of acquired signals.

A protocol was designed to induce emotions. Data were acquired from 24 healthy volunteers. Signals were processed and further analyzed using paired t-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). Machine learning algorithms, Linear Discriminant Function (LDF), Quadratic Discriminant Function (QDF), and Support Vector Machine using kernel Gaussian radial basis function (RBF-SVM) were used to evaluate significant features and classify the emotions.

Computing significant plus ranked features performed better over randomly selected features for pairwise emotion classification. Here, the QDF classifier outperforms LDF. Additionally, ANOVA validated the effectiveness of statistically prominent features to classify emotional states. Ratio_Pulse_Strength, total_power, Spectral Entropy, and meancd5 came out as the four most significant features to classify the emotion “Anxiety”, “Boredom”, “Pain”, and “Reference” with positive prediction rate of 100%, 73%, 100%, and 86% respectively using RBF-SVM in the user-independent model.

Previously, WPS has been used mainly to detect physical abnormality in the human body. The results endorse the potential of user-independent human emotion detection using a wrist pulse signal. The present work was focusing on a few emotional states. Results are encouraging and may be well applied to many more states.