Chaotic Behavior of Heart Rate Signals during Chi and Kundalini Meditation

Abstract

Meditation is commonly perceived as an alternative medicine method of psychological diseases management tool that assist in alleviating depression and anxiety disorders. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the accuracy of different classifiers on the heart rate signals in a specific psychological state. Two types of heart rate time series (before, and during meditation) of 25 healthy women are collected in the meditation clinic in Mashhad. Nonlinear features such as Lyapunov Exponents and Entropy were extracted. To evaluate performance of the classifiers, the classification accuracies and mean square error (MSE) of the classifiers were examined. Different classifiers were tested and the studies confirmed that for the heart rate signals, Quadratic classifier trained on Lyapunov Exponents and Entropy results in higher classification accuracy. The classification accuracy of the Quadratic classifier is 92.31%. However, the accuracies of Fisher and k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) classifiers are encouraging. The classification results demonstrate that the dynamical measures are useful parameters which contain comprehensive information about signals and the Quadratic classifier using nonlinear features can be useful in analyzing the heart rate signals in a specific psychological state.