A distributed event-triggered framework for coordinating athlete autonomic states via wearable sensor networks.

Background: Interpersonal autonomic physiology (IAP) research has established that physiological synchrony (PS), the temporal interdependence of autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity across individuals, is an established phenomenon in team-based settings. However, PS in athlete cohorts has been studied exclusively as a passive observational variable; no framework actively regulates autonomic coherence under the communication constraints of wireless body area networks. This study integrates IAP and distributed control theory by formulating team-level autonomic coherence as a leaderless multi-agent consensus problem. Methods: Each wearable unit was modeled as a two-dimensional linear agent whose state encodes cardiovascular autonomic tone (parasympathetic index: HRV-RMSSD) and sympathetic arousal load (EDA skin-conductance level, SCL), consistent with the Banister Fitness-Fatigue Model. Initial model states were derived from ECG/EDA records of WESAD subjects S2-S7, used only to provide heterogeneous simulation initial conditions (correlations were directional, non-significant sanity checks: Results: The proposed DETM reduced BLE transmissions by 38.38% in the nominal case while achieving convergence of the normalized model states within 4-7 s. A Zeno-free guarantee ( Discussion: These findings support control-theoretic and network-level feasibility only. Athlete studies are required before physiological benefits, safety, or real-world effectiveness can be inferred.