HRV: a Pythonic package for Heart Rate Variability Analysis

Abstract

Heart rate variability (HRV) is a non-invasive tool to assess the cardiac autonomic integrity and cardiovascular homeostasis HRV quantifies the instantaneous variations in the RR intervals (RRi), which is produced by the balanced action of the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) over the sinoatrial (SA) node, and modulated by different physiological inputs (e.g., respiration, blood pressure, temperature, emotions, etc) Specifically, the parasympathetic activation produces fast and short-lasting bradycardia, which results in high-frequency oscillations (i.e., 0.15 -0.40 Hz) in heart rate. On the other hand, sympathetic activation produces slower and longer-lasting variations in heart rate, which results in low-frequency (i.e., ~0.1 Hz) oscillations in heart rate.