Objective: Several different measures of heart rate variability, and particularly of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, are widely used in research and clinical applications. For many purposes it is important to know which features of heart rate variability are directly related to respiration and which are caused by other aspects of cardiac dynamics.
Approach: Inspired by ideas from the theory of coupled oscillators, we use simultaneous measurements of respiratory and cardiac activity to perform a nonlinear disentanglement of the heart rate variability into the respiratory-related component and the rest.
Main results: The theoretical consideration is illustrated by the analysis of 25 data sets from healthy subjects. In all cases we show how the disentanglement is manifested in the different measures of heart rate variability.
Significance: The suggested technique can be exploited as a universal preprocessing tool, both for the analysis of respiratory influence on the heart rate and in cases when effects of other factors on the heart rate variability are in focus.