Evaluation of heart rate variability on transfemoral amputees

The human gait is the mechanism that promotes dislocation between two points of the body safely and efficiently, with low energy expenditure, although individuals with lower limb amputation have a different performance. Often they tend to have asymmetry, increased energy cost, lost of comfort and loss of impact absorption, leading to a overall higher demand on exercise and even on daily life activities such as walking and sitting. To compensate this increase spendure, we investigated their cardiovascular system adaptability analyzing the heart rate variability. After studying 4 transfemoral amputees, we have found that this population may have a higher cardiac demand presented by a higher variation on the values of the heart rate.