Surrogate ECG signals for the null-hypothesis analysis of heart monitoring

This paper introduces a class of synthetic electrocardiograms (ECG) for the purpose of testing the sensitivity and robustness of heart-monitoring techniques in controlled and reproducible simulations. These ECG surrogates are constructed by adapting an existing standard ECG synthesizer to act as a modulator on a tachogram input, enabling null-hypothesis analysis on heart-rate variability. This establishes an empirical link between the tachogram literature and the design of heart monitoring techniques. The new methodology is demonstrated experimentally and its performance is discussed