Do existing measures of Poincareé plot geometry reflect nonlinear features of heart rate variability?

Abstract

Heart rate variability (HRV) is concerned with the analysis of the intervals between heartbeats. An emerging analysis technique is the Poinearé plot, which takes a sequence of intervals and plots each interval against the following interval. The geometry of this plot has been shown to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy subjects in clinical settings. The Poinearé plot is a valuable HRV analysis technique due to its ability to display nonlinear aspects of the interval sequence. The problem is, how do we quantitatively characterize the plot to capture useful summary descriptors that are independent of existing HRV measures? Researchers have investigated a number of techniques: converting..