HRV and ECG signal analysis of smokers and non-smokers

Abstract

The current study deals with the study of Heart Rate Variability and wavelet-based ECG signal analysis of thirty-two volunteers, who were divided into two groups of smokers and non-smokers. Although the preliminary results of frequency domain analysis of HRV showed some dominance towards the sympathetic nervous system activity in smokers, they were not found to be statistically significant. Hence the bias of results towards the increase of sympathetic activity might be attributed to the masking affect of some other factors, apart from smoking, which were not included in our experiment. The wavelet decomposition of the ECG signal was done using the Daubechies (Db 6) wavelet family. No significant difference was observed between the smokers and non-smokers which apparently suggested that HRV does not affect the conduction pathway of heart.