The Basics of HRV – Online professional course by Dr David O’Hare, MD.

Why is this course important?

There are more and more connected apps, wearable devices, clinical studies and software mentioning and using Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as a simple, non invasive way to analyze and evaluate general body health.
HRV has left the labs and the exclusivity of the health professionals for the sports, wellness, personal development and coaching professions.
To date, more than 22.000 official publications about HRV are indexed on the PubMed database in most of the fields pertaining to health and physiological balance.
What has not left the labs is the complexity of the HRV signal and the obscure parameters and standards which remain hard to understand for the layperson.
What is SDNN, RMSSD, Spectral Analysis and the Fast Fourier transformation? It is like latin was to religion, just sometimes hard to grasp without knowledge of the fundamental language.
This course gives a thorough review of the signals, the parameters, the standards and the norms in plain English.

What will you learn in this course?

Understanding the raw values provided by most devices, applications and software committed to HRV analysis is not within reach of most laypersons not familiar with physics, statistics and undulatory exploration. Just take a look into any of the over twenty thousand clinical studies pertaining to HRV and you will be confronted to harsh names and complex norms and units. Even with medical training, these specific ranges of biomedical research are not user friendly. Try to tell one of your patients or clients that their Total Power of the Power Spectrum is over 6500 milliseconds squared over frequency in Hertz (ms2/Hz), they will be thrilled with awe.

In this course the understanding of the results, the units and the norms are stripped down to a simple everyday language understandable by the health professionals but most and mainly by their clients and patients, whatever their educational background may be.

You will learn how a simple signal picked up on your wrist, finger or earlobe is analyzed and broken down into simple figures all of which are a window open into the understanding and the evaluation of the autonomic nervous system and general health.

Every single procedure, method, value and results is simplified and explained so that there will be no more mysteries in the understanding and sharing of the very challenging professional use of heart rate variability health evaluation.

You will learn what is HRV, how it is explored, how to explain the results and indexes the devices you will be using with you clients dans patients.

What are the main chapters of the course?

• Introduction:
  • What is the signal and how is it picked up?
  • How is the data displayed?
• The Autonomic Nervous System
  • Health and Homeostasis
  • The Fight or Flight response of stress
  • The Rest and Digest ressources
  • Why is HRV the main and easiest way to evaluate the Autonomic Nervous System?
• The importance of a good recording
• The basics of statistics
  • Average and Mean values
  • Variance and Standard Deviation
  • Bell Curves
• Time Domain Analysis of HRV
  • Heart Rate
  • SDNN as a marker of the Autonomic Nervous System
  • RMSSD as a marker of the Parasympathetic Nervous System
  • Other norms and ratios currently used
• Frequency Domain Analysis of HRV
  • Understanding wave-like oscillations
  • Light and sound as models
  • Frequency Domain Parameters in HRV
• Main parameters used in HRV
  • General health parameters
  • Ressource markers
  • Stress markers
  • Understanding of baroreflex
• HRV Analysis with the Body Health Analyzer
  • General Health Test
  • Breathwork Test

Who is David O’Hare?

Dr David O’Hare is a French Speaking Medical Doctor born in Canada but who lived in the South of France for over 50 years.
He lived and was trained in Marseilles Medical University and practiced General and Family Medicine for thirty years near that city by the Mediterranean Sea.
He included Breathwork training and paced breathing (a.k.a. coherent breathing) with his patients.
David O’Hare is the author of seven books on paced breathing (Coherence Cardiaque in French) two of which have been translated into English.
He also is an airplane pilot and graduated from Toulouse Medical Faculty in aeronautical and space medicine from which he has kept a great interest for human physiology and the art of measuring health parameters.
David O’Hare now lives in Montreal. He has been training French speaking health professionals in his Breathwork techniques for over fifteen years in Europe and Quebec.
His online course on HRV in French was a success so he was asked to translate it and to record it in English, and this is that course performed in English by its author.