Real-Time Correction of Heart Interbeat Intervals

Heart rate variability (HRV) is traditionally analyzed while a subject is in a controlled environment, such as at rest in a clinic, where it can be used as a medical indicator. This paper concerns analyzing HRV outside of controlled environments, such as on an actively moving person. We describe automated methods for inter-heartbeat interval (IBI) error detection and correction. We collected 124,998 IBIs from 18 subjects, undergoing a variety of active motions, for use in evaluating our methods. Two human graders manually labeled each IBI, evaluating 10% of the IBIs as having an error, which is a far greater error percentage than has been examined in any previous study. Our automated method had a 96% agreement rate with the two human graders when they themselves agreed, with a 49% rate of matching specific error corrections and a 0.01% false alarm rate.