Effects of respiration on heart‐rate variability measures

There are many studies that measure the mental workload or evaluate the autonomous nervous function by heart-rate variability measures. Heart-rate variability is influenced not only by the stress or the workload but also by respiration. Therefore, it is important to clarify the effects of respiration on heart-rate variability measures. This paper discusses the effects of the respiration frequency, the depth of respiration and the dispersion of the respiration interval on heart-rate variability. It was shown that the number of peak and trough waves in the time series of R-R intervals was influenced by the respiration frequency. Moreover, the measures obtained by the power spectral analysis of R-R intervals were found to be influenced considerably by the respiration frequency. The heart-rate variability measures tended to increase with deep respiration. The effects of the dispersion of respiration intervals on heart-rate variability measures were not so remarkable.

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