ArticleMedical education2025
The stressed heart: Validity evidence supporting mobile heart rate variability applications to detect psychological stress in healthcare learners.
Article in Medical education, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Acute effects of "Munz Floor"® fascial stretching on autonomic nervous responses assessed by heart rate variability.Frontiers in physiology · 2026Article
- The stressed heart: Validity evidence supporting mobile heart rate variability applications to detect psychological stress in healthcare learners.Medical education · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
purposeThe stress experienced by healthcare learners and practitioners can impact learning, delivery of care, and mental health. Heightened awareness regarding this impact of stress has sparked the growing use of mobile health technologies for real-time tracking of stress in health professions education. The purpose of this study was to evaluate what can accurately be interpreted by the scores generated by mobile technology, regarding psychological stress levels in medical learners.
methodsIn a quasi-experimental within-subjects design, 10 Emergency Medicine residents experienced two rest periods and two stress-inducing simulation scenarios. Heart rate variability (HRV) parameters produced by a mobile HRV application were compared to a reference standard analysis software, and with traditional stress measures (salivary cortisol and self-report measures) using Pearson correlation coefficients. To determine whether HRV parameters from the mobile application differentiate between rest & psychological stress conditions, a Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA), with condition (rest, stress) as the independent variable, was calculated for the HRV, cortisol and self-report measures.
resultsThe mobile application's time-domain HRV parameters correlate strongly with the reference software (r values: 0.93 to 0.99, all p < 0.01), salivary cortisol levels (r = -0.54 to -63, all p <. 0.01) and self-reported stress (r = -0.46 to -0.49, all p < 0.01). These time-domain HRV parameters also accurately differentiated between rest and stress periods (eta
conclusionThis study provides some validity evidence for the use of a subset of time-domain HRV metrics, captured through a mobile application, for the detection of psychological stress responses in simulated clinical settings. The results also highlight the heterogeneity in HRV metrics produced by various programs. Despite the promise of mobile technologies for the detection of stress in learners and health professionals, further validity research is needed to support their use to detect stress in the health professions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.