Abstract
The aim of this study was to evaluate how heart rate variability (HRV) and reaction time differ when measured in the morning and in the evening of one physically exhausting day in order to explore if these parameters would be sufficient for estimating physical fatigue accumulated during one day. Five different experiment days with fixed schedules were conducted which consisted of measurement set in the morning, physical exercise during the day and measurement set in the evening. The total average reaction time was lower in the morning (228 ± 18 ms) compared to the values measured in the evening (257 ± 22 ms). Both assessed HRV parameters SDNN and RMSSD showed a tendency to decrease during the day (total averages were respectively 61 ± 6 ms and 40 ± 6 ms in the morning vs 37 ± 4 ms and 24 ± 3 ms in the evening). This decrease was more prominent in the heart rate recovery phase compared to the resting heart rate. The results of this study give promising results for new methods for estimating daily physical fatigue and could be a basis for multiple future studies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Mohanavelu, K., Lamshe, R., Poonguzhali, S., Adalarasu, K., Jagannath, M.: Assessment of human fatigue during physical performance using physiological signals: a review. Biomed. Pharmacol. J. 10(4), 1887–1896 (2017)
Shortz, A.E., Franke, M., Kilic, E.S., Peres, S.C., Mehta, R.K.: Evaluation of offshore shiftwork using heart rate variability. In: Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, pp. 1036–1039. SAGE, Austin, TX, USA (2017)
Sabzi, A.H.: The effect of different fatigue protocols on choice reaction time. Middle-East J. Sci. Res. 12(8), 1092–1096 (2012)
SantAna, J., Franchini, E., Silva, V., Diefenthaeler, F.: Effect of fatigue on reaction time, response time, performance time, and kick impact in taekwondo roundhouse kick. Sports Biomech. 16(2), 201–209 (2017)
Pecanha, T., Bartels, R., Brito, L.C., Paula-Ribeiro, M., Oliveira, R.S., Goldberger, J.J.: Methods of assessment of the post-exercise cardiac autonomic recovery: a methodological review. Int. J. Cardiol. 227, 795–802 (2017)
Patel, M., Lal, S.K.L., Kavanagh, D., Rossiter, P.: Applying neural network analysis on heart rate variability data to assess driver fatigue. Expert Syst. Appl. 38, 7235–7242 (2011)
Pichot, V., Bourin, E., Roche, F., Garet, M., Gaspoz, J.-M., Duverney, D., Andoniadis, A., Lacour, J.-R., Barthelemy, J.-C.: Quantification of cumulated physical fatigue at the workplace. Pflügers Archiv – Eur. J. Physiol. 445, 267–272 (2002)
Pichot, V., Roche, F., Gazpoz, J.-M., Enjolras, F., Antoniadis, A., Minini, P., Costes, F., Busso, T., Lacour, J.-R., Barthelemy, J.C.: Relation between heart rate variability and training load in middle-distance runners. Med. Sci. Sports Exerc. 32(10), 1729–1736 (2000)
Bartels-Ferreira, R., de Sousa, E.D., Trevizani, G.A., Silva, L.P., Nakamura, F.Y., Forjaz, C.L.M., Lima, J.R.P., Pecanha, T.: Can a first-order exponential decay model fit heart rate recovery after resistance exercise? Clin. Physiol. Funct. Imaging 35, 98–103 (2015)
Ng, J., Sundaram, S., Kadish, A.H., Goldberger, J.J.: Autonomic effects on the spectral analysis of heart rate variability after exercise. Am. J. Physiol. Heart Circ. Physiol. 297, 1421–1428 (2009)
Goldberger, J.J., Le, F.K., Lahiri, M., Kannankeril, P.J., Ng, J., Kadish, A.H.: Assessment of parasympathetic reactivation after exercise. Am. J. Physiol. Heart Circ. Physiol. 290, 2446–2452 (2006)
Buchheit, M., Papelier, Y., Laursen, P.B., Ahmaidi, S.: Noninvasive assessment of cardiac parasympathetic function: postexercise heart rate recovery or heart rate variability? Am. J. Physiol. Heart Circ. Physiol. 293, 8–10 (2007)
Achten, J., Jeukendrup, A.E.: Heart rate monitoring, applications and limitations. Sports Med. 33(7), 517–538 (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Ethics declarations
The research was funded partly by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research under institutional research financing IUTs 19-1 and 19-2 and by Estonian Centre of Excellence in IT (EXCITE) funded by European Regional Development Fund and supported by Study IT programme of HITSA.
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Allik, A., Pilt, K., Viigimäe, M., Fridolin, I. (2020). Pilot Study for Estimating Physical Fatigue Based on Heart Rate Variability and Reaction Time. In: Henriques, J., Neves, N., de Carvalho, P. (eds) XV Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing – MEDICON 2019. MEDICON 2019. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 76. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31635-8_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31635-8_23
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-31634-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-31635-8
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)