Heart Rate Variability in healthy people compared with patients with Congestive Heart Failure

In this paper we have investigated the differences of heart rate variability (HRV) features between normal subjects and patients suffering from congestive heart failure (CHF) at several levels of NYHA scale. We analyzed 1914.4 hours of ECG of 83 patients of which 54 normal and 29 suffering from CHF with NYHA I, II, III, extracted by public databases. Following international guidelines, we computed time and frequency features of HRV. The measured features have been statistically analyzed per each NHYA class. Finally, features correlation matrix for each class has been studied. The results suggest that differences exist between HRV features of normal subjects and patients suffering from CHF. These differences seems to be related to the severity of the pathology. Finally, we observe that also the correlation matrix changes according to the severity of NYHA.