Spectral Analysis Of Heart Rate Variations: Uncertainty In Estimating The Power Of Spectral Components

Spectral analysis of heart rate variations is increasingly used as a diagnostic tool for evaluating the cardiovascular activity of the autonomic nervous system. Of main interest is the determination of the power of the two spectral components that correspond to sympathetic and parasympathetic activities respectively. The determination of the confidence intervals of these estimates, in the context of spectral analysis based on autoregressive models, is considered in this report.