Shot-wise Heart Rate Variability Analysis on Cricket Players

Most existing research in sports focuses on physical and sport-specific analysis whereas the work on analyzing physiological responses during the game is limited. This paper discusses the observations of a pilot study conducted to measure physiological responses of batsmen in cricket facing match-situation impositions in a practice net. The mental demands of the players during various phases of the study are observed using Heart Rate Variability (HRV) analysis. Nine male division level cricketers batted against a bowling machine. The batsmen wore dry-electrode based chest-belt with a 2-lead ECG recorder to record ECG and accelerometer data during gameplay. A consolidated analysis of heart rate patterns of all batsmen was carried out to investigate the existence of a trend in heart rate variability during the preparatory and recovery phases of each shot. Results concluded the presence of a pattern that generalized heart rate variations across players with a correlation coefficient above 0.9. Comparison of the interquartile ranges of Mean RR intervals showed a drop of 9 ms in the preparation phase for bad shots following a previous good shot and a drop of 24 ms in the recovery phase for bad shots when compared to the previous shot.