On the Variability of Heart Rate Variability—Evidence from Prospective Study of Healthy Young College Students

Heart rate variability (HRV) has been widely used as indices for autonomic regulation, including linear analyses, entropy and multi-scale entropy based nonlinear analyses, and however, it is strongly influenced by the conditions under which the signal is being recorded. To investigate the variability of healthy HRV under different settings, we recorded electrocardiograph (ECG) signals from 56 healthy young college students (20 h for each participant) at campus using wearable single-lead ECG device. Accurate R peak to R peak (RR) intervals were extracted by combing the advantages of five commonly used R-peak detection algorithms to eliminate data quality influence. Thorough and detailed linear and nonlinear HRV analyses were performed. Variability of HRV metrics were evaluated from five categories: (1) different states of daily activities; (2) different recording time period in the same day during free-running daily activities; (3) body postures of sitting and lying; (4) lying on the left, right and back; and (5) gender influence. For most of the analyzed HRV metrics, significant differences (p < 0.05) were found among different recording conditions within the five categories except lying on different positions. Results suggested that the standardization of ECG data collection and HRV analysis should be implemented in HRV related studies, especially for entropy and multi-scale entropy based analyses. Furthermore, this preliminary study provides reference values of HRV indices under various recording conditions of healthy young subjects that could be useful information for different applications (e.g., health monitoring and management).