Effect of integrated yoga on cardiovascular parameters during pregnancy

Practicing yoga during pregnancy gives various benefits such as reduction in back pain, blood circulation improvisation, reduce water detention, strengthen pelvic muscles, relieve digestion problems such as nausea, constipation and gas, manage blood pressure, overcome fatigue and cope up with labour pain or experience less pain. Despite of an increase in interest pertaining to the benefits of yoga practice, a detailed study of changes in physiological signals and the parameters extracted from the peripheral signals of pregnant women such as ECG, PPG due to yoga has been reported rarely. This paper explains the analysis of physiological signals such as electrocardiogram and photoplethysmogram of pregnant women practising yoga. More specifically this study analyses the effect of yoga practise in eight week by observing their ECG and PPG signal parameters change during this period. Physiological parameters extracted from ECG and PPG signals acquired after the specially framed yoga sequence at regular intervals of two weeks. These signals are processed suitably to measure the time domain and frequency domain parameters from ECG signal and contour parameters from PPG signal and analyse their variations over the period considered. Regular yoga practise shows significant changes in the parameters measured from the acquired signals. HRV parameters such as Mean heart rate (MHR), TINN and LF/HF are significantly reduced (P<0.05) due to regular yoga practice. Thus relaxation through yoga practice helps to reduce anxiety during and after labor.