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njit-etd2003-081 - New Jersey Institute of Technology

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241<br />

6.1 Future Work<br />

The applications <strong>of</strong> time-frequency analysis are countless. The constantly improving<br />

wavelet algorithms have provided more insight into a large number <strong>of</strong> clinical applications<br />

in quantifying rapid (transient) changes in biological signals. One application may be the<br />

assessment <strong>of</strong> exercise in athletes in order to find ways to induce an increase in the<br />

parasympathetic activity during or immediately after strenuous exercise. It may also be<br />

used to study electromyographical changes during various conditions or to assess<br />

autonomic nervous system damage. A future project may be the assessment <strong>of</strong> the<br />

autonomic nervous system in spinal cord injury patients. Comparison <strong>of</strong> the rate <strong>of</strong> change<br />

<strong>of</strong> the vagal tone during a provocation <strong>of</strong> healthy subjects to spinal cord injured subjects<br />

may allow us to categorize the severity <strong>of</strong> the injury as well as increase our understanding<br />

<strong>of</strong> the nervous system dysfunction in spinal cord injured people. At last there are now<br />

many new methods available to biomedical researchers to help them in their research.<br />

In this dissertation, many signal processing techniques in time domain, frequency<br />

domain, time-frequency domain as well as statistical techniques have helped providing<br />

more insights to the heart rate variability field. Other helpful insights that might affect the<br />

variability in the data are the gender, smoking, and fitness conditions, which should be<br />

included in normal data for future research. With such a small sample <strong>of</strong> participants<br />

(eight), these conditions should be limited to one gender and one fitness level, with no<br />

smoking to assess better the findings in a specified population.

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