Heart Rate Variability Analysis – Current and Future Trends.pdf

B U S I N E S S B R I E F I N G : G L O B A L H E A L T H C A R E 2 0 0 3 1 Technology Services Dr Tarun Chandra is Product Development Manager at BioTechPlex Corporation. His research interests include medical diagnostics system design and development, advanced signal processing and biostatistics. Dr Donovan B Yeates is Chief Executive Officer of BioTechPlex Corporation and Research Professor of Medicine and Bioengineering at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His research interests include investigation of the neural pathways regulating pulmonary and cardiovascular function. Dr Lid B Wong is Chief Scientific Officer of BioTechPlex Corporation. His research interests centre on high-throughput screening, drug discovery and molecular and cellular signal transduction mechanisms of the cardio- pulmonary system. a report by D r s T a r u n C h a nd r a , D o n o v a n B Y e a t e s and L i d B Won g Product Development Manager, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, BioTechPlex Corporation I n t r o d u c t i o n The variation in the time period separating consecutive heartbeats has come to be conventionally described as heart rate variability (HRV). These inter-beat intervals can be measured conveniently as the time separation between the R peaks of adjacent QRS complexes in a continuous electrocardiogram recording. The sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) regulate the activity of the sinoatrial node, the cardiac pacemaker. The beat-to-beat variation in heart rate therefore reflects the time- varying influence of the ANS and its components, on cardiac function. Over the last 25 years, HRV analysis has established itself as a non-invasive research and clinical tool for indirectly investigating both cardiac and autonomic system function in both health and disease.1 The current methodologies used to analyse HRV are based largely on linear techniques to analyse ‘past’ and ‘present’ electrocardiogram