Quantification of the Relation between Pupillary Diameter and Cardiac Variability

Abstract

The diploma thesis is dedicated to measurement of the pupil size together with cardiac activity and to finding of the relationship between these two signals. There is hypothesis which expects strong relation between these signals as both are innervated by sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. In the biofeedback experiment based on eye-tracking is the luminance value of stimulus directed by real time pupil size and the pupil oscillations are generated. The ECG signal is monitored during the experiment. For data analysis was designed an application in Matlab. The application presents pupil and ECG data in time and frequency domain. The pupil oscillation variability and heart rate variability are computed for processing in time-frequency domain. The analysis is mainly in frequency domain and using statistical analyses are obtained values to compare with the theoretical heart rate values.