Overnight Heart Rate Variability Depends On Age, Gender, And Day Of The Week: A Field Observation Using A Smart Bed Platform

Abstract Introduction Heart rate variability (HRV) is commonly used to assess the activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). ANS function changes, reflected in HRV, result from factors including lifestyle, aging, cardiorespiratory illnesses, sleep state, and physiological stress. Despite broad interest in HRV, few studies have established normative overnight HRV values for a large population. To better understand population level HRV changes, ecologically-valid, overnight sleep SDNN (standard deviation of all normal heartbeat intervals, lower HRV is reflected by lower SDNN) values have been analyzed for a large sample of Sleep Number 360 smart bed users. Methods Overnight SDNN values were obtained over the course of 18.2M sleep sessions from 379,225 sleepers (48 ± 14.7 sessions/user). 50.9 percent of sleepers were female. The age was normally distributed with mean ± SD of 52.8 ± 12.7 years (range 21 to 84). Heartbeat intervals used to compute SDNN were extracted from a ballistocardiogram (BCG). BCG-based HRV estimation during sleep has previously been validated against ECG-based HRV with an R-square of 0.5. Results Using a Generalized Linear Model, significant cross-sectional associations with SDNN were observed for three variables of interest: age, gender, and day-of-the-week. For sleepers under 50, SDNN declined at a rate of about 2.1 ms/year, then leveled off for sleepers aged 50-65, and increased slightly thereafter. Women under 50 displayed lower, more slowly declining, SDNN values than men, but this trend reversed for sleepers over 50. Throughout the week, SDNN values followed a U-shaped (women) or L-shaped (men) pattern, where values were highest during the weekend and lowest at mid-week. Conclusion Using a smart bed to unobtrusively measure overnight SDNN values for a large set of sleepers in an ecologically valid environment, reveals significant effects of age, gender, and day of the week on overnight SDNN. Support (if any):