An user-friendly toolkit for heart rate variability analysis: Suitable for automatic analysis of episodes

In this work, a software package, called gHRV, and dedicated to the automatic analysis and study of the heart rate variability is presented. The software is provided with a graphical user interface, is both free and open source, and allows to perform both spectral and nonlinear analysis of several parameters related to the cardiac rhythm. To show the ease-of use, a detailed example employing a polysomnogram is presented, to study if differences in the various sleep stages can be found employing gHRV. As a result, the software has been proven to be potentially useful for discriminating among the previous mentioned stages, by analyzing the power in the different spectral bands, as well as other parameters.