What if your Apple Watch, Fitbit, or other heart rate monitor could tell you, based on your heart rate variability, that you could be at risk for sleep apnea? What if your wearable technology could inform you of a health condition BEFORE you started having symptoms? Abraham Otero, Associate Professor of Information Technology at San Pablo University, discusses the technology that may someday turn these possibilities into reality. His research on heart rate variability analysis with the R package RHRV, a heart rate variability analysis software tool, uses algorithms to non-invasively assess patients’ cardiovascular health.

In this episode, Otero overviews what causes and controls heart rate variability, what this means about the patient’s overall health, and how this technology uses algorithms to identify patients with certain health conditions. Otero discusses the current and future research using this software, and how this technology may someday be used as a preventative healthcare tool.

For more information, visit http://rhrv.r-forge.r-project.org/.

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