New insights into the relationship between Poincare plot geometry and linear measures of heart rate variability

Abstract

The Poincare plot is an emerging Heart Rate Variability (HRV) analysis technique, the geometry of which has been shown to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy subjects in clinical settings. The Poincare plot is able to display nonlinear aspects of the interval sequence and is therefore of interest in characterizing the nonlinear aspects of HRV. The problem is, how do we quantitatively characterize the geometry of the plot to capture useful descriptors that are independent of existing HRV measures? In this paper, we investigate a popular existing category of techniques and show that they measure linear aspects of the intervals which existing HRV indices already specify. The fact that these methods appear insensitive to the nonlinear characteristics of the intervals is an important finding because the Poincare plot is primarily a nonlinear technique.