Sternal Pulse Rate Variability Compared with Heart Rate Variability on Healthy Subjects

The heart rate variability (HRV) is a commonly used method to quantify the sympathetic and the parasympathetic modulation of the heart rate. HRV is mainly conducted on electrocardiograms (ECG). However, the use of photo-plethysmography (PPG) as a marker of the autonomic tone is emerging. In this study we investigated the feasibility of deriving pulse rate variability (PRV) using PPG signals recorded by a reflectance PPG sensor attached to the chest bone (sternum) and comparing it to HRV. The recordings were conducted on 9 healthy subjects being in a relaxed supine position and under forced respiration, where the subjects were asked to breathe following a visual scale with a rate of 27 breaths/min. HRV parameters such as the mean intervals (meanNN), the standard deviation of intervals (SDNN), the root mean square of difference of successive intervals (RMSSD), and the proportion of intervals differing more than 50 ms (pNN50) were calculated from the R peak-to-R peak (R-R) and pulse-to-pulse (P-P) intervals. In the frequency domain the low and high frequency ratio of the power spectral density (LF/HF) was also computed. The Pearson correlation coefficient showed significant correlation for all the parameters (r > 0.95 with p < 0.001) and the Bland-Altmann analysis showed close agreement between the two methods for all the parameters during resting and forced respiration condition. Thus, PRV analysis using sternal PPG can be an alternative to HRV analysis on healthy subjects at rest.