Combined Time-Frequency Calculation of pNN50 Metric From Noisy Heart Rate Measurements

pNN50 is a metric derived from heart rate (HR) measurements, and it is known to correlate with mental-workload changes in human subjects. Conventionally, this metric is calculated based on the variability of successive time periods in peak-to-peak occurrences in HR data. In the case of noisy measurements of HR, however, peak-to-peak detection may not be reliable. Here, we present a combined time-frequency domain analysis, benefiting from Short Time Fourier Transform, by which we can more accurately extract pNN50 metric from noisy HR data. An experimental measurement with added noise is used as a benchmark problem to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach with noticeable improvement over the conventional time domain peak-to-peak detection algorithm.