Time/frequency mapping of the heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory signals.

The discrete Wigner distribution (DWD) was implemented for the time/frequency mapping of variations of R-R interval, blood pressure and respiratory signals. The smoothed cross-DWD was defined and the modified algorithm for the smoothed auto- and cross-DWD was proposed. Spurious cross-terms were suppressed using a smoothing data window and a Gauss frequency window. The DWD is easy to implement using the FFT algorithm. Examples show that the DWD follows well the instantaneous changes of spectral content of cardiovascular and respiratory signals which characterise the dynamics of autonomic nervous system responses.