A NEW APPROACH FOR TIME-FREQUENCY ANALYSIS OF HEART RATE VARIABILITY AND ASSESSMENT OF TIME-FREQUENCY REPRESENTATIONS

ABSTRACT Heart rate variability signals usually contain several special characteristics and interference, such as multiple oscillations, 1/f fluctuations, transient changes, very low frequency trends, and noises. Nevertheless, the effects of these special phenomena on time-frequency signal analysis are seldom discussed. In this paper, a new approach is presented to suppress the interfering cross terms in the Wigner-Ville distribution. In comparison with various time-frequency methods, our method provides excellent cross-term suppression at the presence of multiple oscillations, 1/f characteristics, and very low frequency trends, and inherits the advantages of the Wigner-Ville distribution dealing with transient changes and noises.