Assessment and diagnostic applications of heart rate variability

Abstract

Though heart rate (HR) is one of the basic parameters in medical diagnostics, precise and reliable assessment of its variability is still an engineering and physiological challenge. Measurement of HR and its changes over time, as in a stress test, is a routine diagnostic procedure to evaluate the cardiovascular condition of a patient. Prenatal monitoring, with its unique problems regarding noninvasive acquisition of reliable fetal data, heavily relies on diagnostic HR analysis.