Can Pulse Rate Variability be Used to Monitor Compliance with a Breath Pacer?

Area of Science:

• Physiology
• Biomedical Engineering
• Mind-Body Medicine

Background:

• Slow-paced breathing offers significant health benefits.
• Monitoring adherence to prescribed breathing patterns during meditation is crucial.
• Pulse rate variability (PRV) is a potential, non-invasive metric for assessing physiological responses.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the efficacy of pulse rate variability (PRV) in monitoring compliance with a breath pacer.
• To develop and evaluate methods for detecting non-adherence using PRV during paced breathing sessions.
• To compare the effectiveness of PRV-based monitoring against existing methods.

Main Methods:

• Recruited 6 human subjects for trials involving following or not following a breath pacer.
• Collected data on pulse rate variability (PRV) changes during breathing sessions.
• Developed logistic regression and running standard deviation techniques to analyze PRV for compliance detection.

Main Results:

• PRV alone demonstrated limited reliability in detecting non-compliance with the breath pacer.
• Both developed PRV-based models showed limitations, including false positives and negatives.
• Accuracy of PRV-based detection ranged between 65% and 67%.

Conclusions:

• Pulse rate variability (PRV) is not a sufficiently reliable sole indicator for monitoring breath pacer compliance.
• Current methods utilizing visual, audio, and motion signals outperform PRV-based approaches for compliance monitoring.
• Further research may be needed to integrate PRV with other physiological or behavioral signals for improved accuracy.