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Updated: Jul 15, 2026
Calculating Heart Rate Variability from ECG Data from Youth with Cerebral Palsy During Active Video Game Sessions
Published on: June 5, 2019
Respiratory-phase domain analysis of heart rate variability can accurately estimate cardiac vagal activity during a
Kiyoshi Kotani1, Kiyoshi Takamasu, Makoto Tachibana
1Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. kota@nano.pe.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Objectives:
The objectives of this paper were to present a method to extract the amplitude of RSA in the respiratory-phase domain, to compare that with subjective or objective indices of the MWL (mental workload), and to compare that with a conventional frequency analysis in terms of its accuracy during a mental arithmetic task.
Methods:
HRV (heart rate variability), ILV (instantaneous lung volume), and motion of the throat were measured under a mental arithmetic experiment and subjective and objective indices were also obtained. The amplitude of RSA was extracted in the respiratory-phase domain, and its correlation with the load level was compared with the results of the frequency domain analysis, which is the standard analysis of the HRV.
Results:
The subjective and objective indices decreased as the load level increased, showing that the experimental protocol was appropriate. Then, the amplitude of RSA in the respiratory-phase domain also decreased with the increase in the load level. The results of the correlation analysis showed that the respiratory-phase domain analysis has higher negative correlations, -0.84 and -0.82, with the load level as determined by simple correlation and rank correlation, respectively, than does frequency analysis, for which the correlations were found to be -0.54 and -0.63, respectively. In addition, it was demonstrated that the proposed method could be applied to the short-term extraction of RSA amplitude.
Conclusions:
We proposed a simple and effective method to extract the amplitude of the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) in the respiratory-phase domain and the results show that this method can estimate cardiac vagal activity more accurately than frequency analysis.
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