Study of the effect of a patriotic song on autonomic nervous system and heart using ECG signal analysis

The current study was designed to study the effect of a patriotic song (stimulus) on the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) physiology. The alteration of the ANS physiology was estimated from the heart rate variability (HRV) analysis. The electrocardiogram (ECG) signals were acquired in the pre- and post-stimulus conditions. The results suggested an increase in the parasympathetic activity during the post-stimulus condition. The ECG signals were further analyzed in the time domain. Numerous statistical features of the ECG signals were significantly different (with predictor importance > 0.95) during the post-stimulus condition as compared to the pre-stimulus condition thereby suggesting an alteration in the cardiac electrophysiology. The important features, identified from both HRV and ECG signal processing, were classified using radial basis function (RBF) artificial neural network (ANN). A classification efficiency of >85% was obtained.