Estimating the Heart Instantaneous Frequency Using the Earm Algorithm

The cardiac signal (ECG) have some characteristics which we may understand the internal mechanisms of sympathetic and pathetic systems. The main caractheristic is its quasi-periodic behavior. This behavior can be analysed through HRV – Heart Rate Variability formed by the time differences between two consecutive major peaks in a cardiac signal. Due to sample rate of HRV, alternatives methods was proposed to extract the HRV from ECG. Barros and Ohnishi [1] proposed the HIF Method – HIF – Heart Instantaneous Frequency, that use a driver function and wavelets to calculate the instantaneous frequency of ECG with small error in respect to HRV. In this paper, we verfy the strength of our algorithm – EARM –, comparing the results obtained from it to the ones obtained from HIF, using samples of regular cardiac signals and sleep apnea ones. The comparatives results show a small error, demonstrating that EARM method can be used as alternative to HRV.