We experience huge variations in our heart rates on a daily basis; from the slow heart rate that occurs just before drifting off to sleep, to the chest pounding we’ve all experienced after climbing a particularly challenging flight of stairs.

There are more subtle variations even when we are at rest, though, that are now being considered as a means to track well-being.

Abraham Otero, Associate Professor of Information Technology at San Pablo University, joins us today to discuss the technology that may someday enable us to diagnose health conditions based on our individual heart rate variability. He discusses his research on heart rate variability analysis with the R package RHRV, a heart rate variability analysis software tool.

Otero introduces us to how algorithms are used in this package, how heart rate variability is currently being used to identify sleep apnea patients (when compared to control patients without sleep apnea), and how this technology may be used in the future to diagnose patients with other health conditions.

For more information, visit http://rhrv.r-forge.r-project.org/.

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