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Updated: Sep 2, 2026

Calculating Heart Rate Variability from ECG Data from Youth with Cerebral Palsy During Active Video Game Sessions
Published on: June 5, 2019
Scale invariance in the nonstationarity of human heart rate
P Bernaola-Galván1, P C Ivanov, L A Nunes Amaral
1Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA.
Abstract:
We introduce a segmentation algorithm to probe the temporal organization of heterogeneities in human heartbeat interval time series. We find that the lengths of segments with different local mean heart rates follow a power-law distribution and show that this scale-invariant structure is not a simple consequence of the long-range correlations present in the data. The differences in mean heart rates between consecutive segments display a common functional form, but with different parameters for healthy individuals and for heart-failure patients. These findings suggest that there is relevant physiological information hidden in the heterogeneities of the heartbeat time series.
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