An R package for heart rate variability analysis

We describe a novel software package, RHRV, which we have developed for studying heart rate variability (HRV) as an indicator for the state of the cardiovascular control system and as a discriminator for chronic sleep disorders. The RHRV package is written in the open source statistical environment R, and has recently been made available as a third party contribution to the R-CRAN repository. In this article, we motivate the necessity for the development of an open-source software platform which can be used for developing new algorithms for studying HRV. We demonstrate aspects of our software platform through the analysis of representative signals.