COMPLEXITY and INFORMATION-BASED ANALYSIS of the HEART RATE VARIABILITY (HRV) while SITTING, HAND BIKING, WALKING, and RUNNING

Abstract

Analysis of the variations of heart activity during different human activities is an important area of research in sport sciences. Therefore, in this paper, we evaluated the variations of heart activity for 23 subjects while sitting, hand biking, walking, and running. Since the obtained R-R time series (as the indicator of heart rate variability (HRV)) has a complex structure that contains information, we employed fractal dimension, sample entropy, and Shannon entropy for our analysis. According to the results, doing a harder activity causes a more significant alteration in the complexity and information content of HRV. The results of statistical analyses also verified the obtained results. Similar investigations can be conducted in case of other activities to evaluate the variations in heart activity in different conditions.