A system for selectable comparative appraisal of heart rate variability

Electrocardiographic signals are commonly recorded and analyzed for the purpose of identifying intermittently occurring disturbances in the heart rhythm. In this study, the time-domain parameters are associated mostly with overall variability of heart rate (HR) over the time of recording and the frequency-domain measures pertain to HR variability at specific physiological processes. The developed evaluation method for HRV analysis is implemented as an offline system which consists of integrated hardware components and specifically developed software tools. Specifically, this includes the analysis of the ECG segments containing selectable number of data points in one minute or longer segments and also allows a sampling rate of 128 to 960 samples per sec. The evaluation and plotting routines were developed in Matlab. The presented method allows rapid evaluation of HRV and its numerical and graphical representation.