Smart devices, including the popular smart watches, often collect information on the heart beat rhythm and transmit it to a central server for storage or further processing. A factor introducing important limitations in the amount of data collected, transmitted and finally processed is the life of the mobile device or smart watch battery. Some devices choose to transmit the mean heart rate over relatively long periods of time, to save power. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) analysis gives useful information about the human heart, by only examining the heart rate time series. Its discriminating capability is affected by the amount of available information to process. Ideally, the whole RR interval time series should be used. We investigate here how this discriminating capability is affected, when the analysis is based on mean heart rate values transmitted over relatively long time periods. We show that we still can get useful information and the discriminating power is still remarkable, even when the amount of the available data is relatively small.
Keywords: HRV analysis; Sensors; low rate transmission; smart watch.