Abstract
(1) Background: This research is aimed to develop new methods to investigate the cardiorespiratory interaction of Zen-meditation practitioners (Zen-meditation group) and healthy ordinary young people (control group) by quantitatively evaluating the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) behavior. (2) Methods: Twenty-five voluntary controls and seven Zen-meditation practitioners were recruited. Experimental protocol involves five sessions of different mental-stress levels (control group) and five sessions of Zen-meditation practice (experimental group). Forty-minute (thirty-minute) ECG and respiratory signals were recorded for each control (experimental) subject. By detecting R peaks, heart-rate sequence is constructed. Two methods are proposed to evaluate RSA behavior based on cycle-to-cycle synchronization between heart-rate and respiratory sequence. (3) Results: Based on the proposed method of computing RSA coefficient, control group average for each session is 0.70 (Rest I), 0.65 (CAT I), 0.75 (BC), 0.63 (CAT II) and 0.70 (Rest II); whereas Zen-meditation group average is 0.81 (S1), 0.84 (S2), 0.84 (S3), 0.86 (S4) and 0.81 (S5), all superior to which of the control group. Average RSA normal rate in Zen-meditation group (91.03%) remarkably surpasses which in the control group (80.48%) in the Rest sessions. (4) Conclusions: Using the time-domain HRV (heart-rate variability) as a reference, our methods, RSA coefficient and RSA normal rate, provide more reliable and direct estimate of RSA behavior than conventional peak-valley method computing the inspiratory–expiratory difference in R-to-R interval of ECG. Moreover, results of the proposed methods are confined in a specified range (RSA coefficient between 0 and 1, RSA normal rate between 0% and 100%) facilitates the interpretation of the quantitative RSA behavior. In the RSA analysis, breathing-control session using anthropic interventions induces more prominent RSA activity in control group. Nevertheless, HHIS Zen meditation, with excellent qi circulation activated by ten-mailuns system, naturally (in the way of do-nothing) elicits superior RSA performance better than sophisticated way of breathing control.
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