Background and Objective: Advancement in mental health care requires easily accessible diagnostic and treatment assessment tools. There is an ongoing search for biomarkers that would enable objectification and automatization of the diagnostic and treatment process dependent on a psychiatric interview. Current wearable technology and computational methods make it possible to incorporate heart rate variability (HRV), an indicator of autonomic nervous system functioning and a potential biomarker of disease severity in mental disorders, into accessible diagnostic and treatment assessment frameworks.
Methods: We used a commercially available electrocardiography (ECG) chest strap with a built-in accelerometer, i.e. Polar H10, to record R-R intervals and activity of 30 hospitalized schizophrenia or bipolar disorder patients and 30 control participants for 1.5-2 hours time periods.
We performed an analysis to assess the relationship between HRV and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) test scores. The source code for the reproduction of all experiments is available on GitHub while the dataset is available in Zenodo.
Results and Conclusions: Mean HRV values were lower in the patient group and negatively correlated with the results of the PANSS general subcategory. For the control group, we also discovered the inversely proportional dependency between the mobility coefficient based on accelerometer data and HRV. This relationship was less pronounced for the patient group. This indicates that HRV and mobility may be promising markers in disease diagnosis.