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

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