Privacy-Preserving ECG-HRV Emotion Classification for Mood Swing Detection using Federated Learning on Constrained Edge Devices

Abstract

This paper presents a privacy-preserving mood monitoring framework that classifies emotional states from ECG-derived heart rate variability (HRV) features. The framework is evaluated on three public datasets comprising 74 participants and further validated using a wearable device in a pilot study. Leave-One-Participant-Out cross-validation (LOPO-CV) is used to assess generalization to unseen individuals. A series of experiments investigates the impact of temporal windowing, HRV feature selection, and class balancing on both four-class valence-arousal and binary valence classification. Results show that class balancing substantially improves minority-class recall, while Logistic Regression consistently outperforms five alternative classifiers and achieves competitive performance against HRV-based baselines. Pilot validation using a Polar H10 wearable achieves 75% binary valence accuracy on an unseen individual without calibration, demonstrating the feasibility of real-world deployment. To preserve privacy, the framework is also implemented using federated learning on a six-node Raspberry Pi cluster. Federated Logistic Regression achieves performance comparable to centralized training without sharing raw physiological data. These results demonstrate the potential of interpretable and privacy-preserving mood monitoring for continuous mental health assessment in clinical and community settings.