Background: Although heart rate variability (HRV) has diagnostic and prognostic value for the assessment of cardiac risk, HRV analysis is not routinely performed in a hospital setting. Current HRV analysis methods are primarily quantitative; such methods are sensitive to signal contamination and require extensive post hoc processing.
Methods And Results: Raw electrocardiogram (ECG) data from the Sleep Heart Health Study was transformed into electrocardiomatrix (ECM), in which sequential cardiac cycles are aligned, in parallel, along a shared axis.