A System for the Comprehensive Quantification of Real-Time Heartbeat Activity

Heartbeat can reflect the dynamics of the heart control system, and it is also a commonly used index in health monitoring, exercise load calculation and psycho-physiological arousal quantification. This paper fuses three heartbeat measures, i.e. the running mean, the range of local Hurst exponents and the relative fluctuation, to construct a system that can automatically quantify the heartbeat activity both from its static aspect and from its dynamic aspect in a real-time manner. Experiments show that the system can reveal the heartbeat arousal difference between physically relaxed status and exercise-loaded status. When the affective heartbeat data in literature are quantified by this system, the results also show the capability of the system to illustrate psycho-physiological arousal.