Continuous representation of unevenly sampled signals : an application to the analysis of heart rate variability

Abstract

The various methods for continuous representation of heart rate were tested on artificial signals as well as on real patient data. The limitation for the tests on real HR data is, that no error for the HR representation can be calculated for the values between measurements since thes 'are unknown. It can clearly be seen that only two of the methods for continuous representation of HR actually retain the original HR values: IHR and DECON. By improvements of the algorithm used for the deconvolution method in terms of higher computational precision, the errors obtained with this technique can be further reduced. But even in its current state, DECON is clearly superior to all the other techniques and can serve to judge the quality of all simplified techniques for the continuous representation of heart rate.