Abstract
This paper shows a method of evaluating the accuracy of the instantaneous heart rate reconstruction. A general evaluation scheme and a new evaluation index have been proposed and three reconstruction methods, Derivative of Cubic Spline Interpolation (DCSI), Resampled Instantaneous Heart Rate (RIHR) and Spline Smoothed Instantaneous Heart Rate (SIHR), are compared. Computer simulation based on Integrated pulse frequency modulation (IPFM) model with modulating signals having 1/f power spectrum characteristics has been carried out for comparison. A new index named the Effective bandwidth showed better performance in the following order, i.e. DCSI > SIHR > RIHR. It is also noted that SIHR have less estimation bias compared to DCSI in high frequency region. The method will be useful for precise characterization of the frequency domain characteristics of the heart rate.
