Proposal of the Evaluation Method of the Heart Rate Variability using the Frequency Information of the Electrocardiogram

In this paper, the method for the heart rate variability evaluation which uses the frequency information on electrocardiogram (ECG) is proposed. The proposal method does not extract the time series of the R-R intervals from the ECG, so the processing greatly becomes handy, and the method has the advantage of suitable for the real-time processing. The try by which the parameters of the heart rate variability are extracted directly from the frequency information of the ECG is not done so far. The heart-rate (HR) and the coefficient of variance of the RR intervals (CVrr) was targeted as parameters of heart rate variability. In the proposal method, the amplitude spectra corresponding to the R wave of the electrocardiogram is extracted from the all spectra of the ECG. The heart rate is obtained from the peak frequency, and the CVrr is obtained by using the standard deviation and the peak frequency of the spectra. The correlation coefficient of the parameter of the method and the parameter of the proposal method was obtained so far, so the correlation coefficient of the HR was 0.99 and the correlation coefficient of the CVrr was 0.92. It was able to be confirmed to be able to calculate the HR and CVrr by high accuracy by the proposal method. The possibility to the arrythmia diagnosis and the possibility of the evaluation by a new aspect which used frequency information of ECG was illustrated.