tach reads an annotation file (specified by the annotator and record arguments) and produces a uniformly sampled and smoothed instantaneous heart rate signal. Smoothing is accomplished by finding the number of fractional R-R intervals within a window (with a width of 2k output sample intervals, where k is a smoothing constant) centered on the current output sample. By default, the output is in text form, and consists of a column of numbers, which are samples of the instantaneous heart rate signal (in units of beats per minute). Optionally, the output sample number can be printed before each output sample value. Alternatively, tach can create a DB record containing the heart rate signal.
Studies of heart rate variability generally require special treatment of ectopic beats. Typically, ventricular ectopic beat annotations are removed from the input annotation file and replaced by `phantom' beat annotations at the expected locations of sinus beats. The same procedure can be used to fill in gaps resulting from other causes, such as momentary signal loss. It is often necessary to post-process the output of tach to remove impulse noise in the heart rate signal introduced by the presence of non-compensated ectopic beats, especially supraventricular ectopic beats. Note that tach performs none of these manipulations, although it usually attempts limited outlier rejection (tach maintains an estimate of the mean absolute deviation of its output, and replaces any output that is more than three times this amount from the previous value with the previous value).
Options include:
Reference (`atruth') annotation files can be used as input to tach, but files that contain manually-inserted annotations are less suitable, since annotation placement is likely to be less consistent than in annotation files generated by programs such as sqrs(1) .
The shell variable DB should be set and exported (see setdb(1) ).