Continuous monitoring of HRV in esports players

Aims: Esports is a rapidly growing industry with large global revenues streams which have been used to invest in player performance and offer substantial monetary prizes for competitive players. Heart rate variability (HRV) has been studied widely as a measure of sympathetic activity and stress. Whilst often employed in athletes to monitor condition and performance, it has scarcely been explored in esports.

Methods and results: This study assesses observational changes in time-domain variables of HRV over the course of an esports session. We found that mean Standard deviation of RR intervals (SDRR)was lower in the winning compared to the losing team and that there were certain areas of analogous change in HRV in multiple players, mainly at the end of play. However, our results show that throughout most of the session there was considerable intra-player variability in HRV and that without high resolution contextual information it is not possible to confidently link this data with performance.

Conclusion: Our results add further evidence of HRV being a sensitive measure of stress that requires further study to extract meaningful results.