Abstract
The analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) has been performed on long-term electrocardiography (ECG) recordings (12~24 hours) and short-term recordings (2~5 minutes), which may not capture momentary change of HRV. In this study, we present a new method to analyze the momentary HRV (mHRV). The ECG recordings were segmented into a series of overlapped HRV analysis windows with a window length of 5 minutes and different time increments. The performance of the proposed method in delineating the dynamics of momentary HRV measurement was evaluated with four commonly used time courses of HRV measures on both synthetic time series and real ECG recordings from human subjects and dogs. Our results showed that a smaller time increment could capture more dynamical information on transient changes. Considering a too short increment such as 10 s would cause the indented time courses of the four measures, a 1-min time increment (4-min overlapping) was suggested in the analysis of mHRV in the study. ECG recordings from human subjects and dogs were used to further assess the effectiveness of the proposed method. The pilot study demonstrated that the proposed analysis of mHRV could provide more accurate assessment of the dynamical changes in cardiac activity than the conventional measures of HRV (without time overlapping). The proposed method may provide an efficient means in delineating the dynamics of momentary HRV and it would be worthy performing more investigations.
Highlights
Heart rate variability (HRV), the variation of the period between consecutive heart beats over time is the result of complex regulation mechanism through which the autonomic nervous system (ANS) rules heart rate and keeps cardiovascular parameters within physiological ranges [1]
When increasing the time increment to 5 min, which means there was no overlapping between two adjacent analysis windows, all the three measures could not provide any information about the temporal dynamics in the representative synthetic signal
These time and frequency analysis measures of HRV have provided valuable insights into the cardiac autonomic nervous function, they are limited by their inability to adequately assess transient changes in heart rate, which are associated with rapid changes in physiological status, due to all conventional measures are averaged over quite a long time
Summary
Heart rate variability (HRV), the variation of the period between consecutive heart beats over time is the result of complex regulation mechanism through which the autonomic nervous system (ANS) rules heart rate and keeps cardiovascular parameters within physiological ranges [1]. HRV analysis provides significant non-invasive information on ANS activity [2,3]. Many studies have demonstrated the significant relationships between the HRV and physiological and psychological activity such as myocardial infarction, mental stress and anxiety disorders. Dynamic Analysis of Momentary Heart Rate Variability. Innovation Research Team Fund for Low-cost Healthcare Technologies. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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