Morphology variability of radial pulse wave during exercise

Pulse wave contains much information on a cardiovascular system. Pulse wave variability during exercise is of great significance as it reflects more information combining with pulse wave under stationary state. This paper studied the morphology variability of radial pulse wave during exercise. Radial pulse waves were collected from 30 subjects with two pressure pulse sensors worn at the wrists of the right and left hands, respectively. Electrocardiography (ECG) was also detected synchronously. After data preprocessing and feature point extraction, the variability of several parameters of pulse wave and ECG were analyzed. It is notable that pulse rate (PR) and heart rate (HR) change synchronously. During the exercise period, both systolic phase and diastolic phase of a radial pulse shorten but the latter is more obvious. The amplitude of the dicrotic notch decreases and even turns negative. Aligning the radial pulse waveforms together, the radial pulse waveforms prior to, during and after exercise coincide with each other except for some details like the tidal wave which fades away during exercise.