Sport?Sicuro! A Graphical User Interface for Continuous Cardiovascular Monitoring while Playing Sport Based on Heart Rate and Heart-Rate Variability

Abstract

Heart rate (HR) and heart-rate variability (HRV) are increasingly used to assess the body response to heavy physical effort and to define cardiovascular risk indices for sport related sudden cardiac death. The complexity of physiological phenomena affecting HR and HRV makes difficult the interpretation of measures provided by commercial wearable technologies for athletes and trainers. Availability of interactive applications for analysis of HR series can optimize continuous cardiovascular self-monitoring while training. This paper proposes Sport?Sicuro!, a graphical user interface that allows automatic computation of prevention and performance indexes from HR series for cardiovascular monitoring while practicing sport. This tool is an interactive instrument to support self-monitoring of athletes as well as the work of sport medicine clinicians. Sport?Sicuro! was developed under MATLAB®. Automatic analysis of HR series is based on some unchangeable features definitions provided in literature, and other arbitrary settings, the default values of which can be changed by the user. Eventually, Sport?Sicuro! provides a report file listing all the quantitative results of the HR analysis. Thus, Sport?Sicuro! represents a potentially useful graphical tool for automatic and objective analysis of HR series in sport.

Wearable and Portable Devices for Acquisition of Cardiac Signals while Practicing Sport: A Scoping Review

“…During sport activity, wearable and portable devices are commonly used to reliably acquire cardiac functionality and to provide useful clinical information on an athlete’s health status [ 4 , 11 , 12 ]. Information gathered from these devices may be used by coaches to optimize athlete training and performance and by clinicians to monitor athlete health and evaluate the cardiovascular risk under physical/psychological stress [ 3 , 4 , 13 ].…”