Extension of the heart timing signal to the HRV analysis in the presence of ectopic beats

Here, the Integral Pulse Frequency Modulation (IPFM) model has been extended to continuous time to model the premature resetting of the sino-atrial (SA) node when ectopic beats appear. Heart Timing (HT) signal is a precise representation of the Heart Rate Variability (HRV) according to the IPFM model. A method based on the HT signal and the extended IPFM model is presented for reducing the spectral corruption generated by the ectopic beats. A white noise driven autoregressive (AR) model of a clinically normal HRV subject is taken to input the IPFM model and simulate the beat sequences to evaluate the new technique. The more usual methods of HRV Power Spectral Density (PSD) estimation are compared. Results show how the HT signal, with the proposed method for ectopic effect reduction, exhibits the lowest sensitivity to the ectopic beats presence, 20 times lower than the next best method.