Analysis of Heart Rate Dynamics Before and During Meditation

Abstract

Heart rate is one of the most important vital signs. People usually face high tension in routine life, and if we found an effective method to control the heart rate, it would be very desirable. One of the goals of this paper is to examine changes in heart rate before and during meditation. Another goal is that what impact could have meditation on the human heartbeat. To heart rate analysis before and during meditation, available heart rate signals have been used for the Physionet database that contains 10 normal subjects and 8 subjects that meditation practice has been done on them. In this paper, first is paid to extract linear and nonlinear characteristics of heart rate and then is paid to the best combination of features to identify two intervals before and during meditation using MLP and SVM classifiers with the help of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy measurements. The achieved results in this paper showed that choosing the best combination of a feature to make a meaningful difference between two intervals before and during meditation includes two-time features (Mean HR, SDNN), a frequency feature (Formula presented), and three nonlinear characteristics ((Formula presented). (Formula presented). the maximum Lyapunov exponent). Also, using the support vector machine had better results than the MLP neural network. The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the mean and standard deviation obtained respectively like (Formula presented) by using MLP and respectively like (Formula presented), and 94.90±0.14 by using SVM. The results also show a valid evidence that this method can be used as a criterion of physiological impact on subjects performing meditation. As a result, using meditation can reduce the stress and anxiety of patients by effects on heart rate, and the treatment process speeds up and have an important role in improving the performance of the system.