Sleep-Wakefulness Determinations from Heart Rate Data

摘要

Our investigation into the relationship between sleep depth and instananeous beat-by-beat heart rate has been carried out intermittently over the past ten years. Many properties of the relationship between heart beat patterns and the quantity and quality of sleep have been investigated in our laboratory. For the past decade, a number of projects have been conducted in the Biomedical Engineering Program here at the University of Texas regarding the development of automated sleep scoring software. Specifically, these projects involved bandwidth reduction of sleep, extraction of sleep information from heart rate data, analysis of sleep cycles, detection of REM, 1 sleep stage of eye movement from beat-by-beat heart rate, classification of sleep into awake, REM-1, and Stage 2, 3 and 4 using the beatquency domain. All of these projects were undertaken with a common goal in mind. That is, the development of an automated process by which rapid, inexpensive determinations of levels of alertness could be determined accurately using an easily obtained physiological parameter. The physiologic parameter chosen in our studies was the beat-by-beat heart rate.