In the past twenty years technological progress has allowed us to develop devices which make it possible to record blood pressure and heart rate outside the laboratory environment and thus to collect observations in the subject’s real living conditions. Furthermore, technological progress has provided computer tools to analyse data on a beat-to-beat basis, offering a large body of information on the complex patterns of blood pressure and heart rate variability in health and in disease which has clarified a number of mechanisms responsible for cardiovascular regulation during the day and night.

This book aims at providing an updated state of the art on the analysis of blood pressure and heart rate variability from the different perspectives of physiologists, clinicians and engineers by gathering the contributions of experts taken from both the biomedical and the engineering environment.

In this framework, a special symposium was held in Verona (Italy) in 1991* where the experts contributing to this book were invited to make a clearcut point on some of the matters pertinent to the dynamic analysis of cardiovascular signals and to debate the many open questions that still exist in this field.

In particular, attention was focused on: 1) the methodology of ambulatory blood pressure and heart rate analyses, 2) the mathematical models that can be derived from the data and the implications they have for the understanding of normal and deranged cardiovascular control and 3) the present and future use of computer analysis of dynamically collected observations for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases.

We thank the authors for their effort. We also thank Centro Auxologico Italiano, Fnd. Pro Juventute Don Carlo Gnocchi, Ospedale Maggiore ed Universita’ di Milano, Milano, Italy for organising the symposium and Glaxo Italy for its generous contribution. We hope that the attempt made in this volume to clarify some of the controversial matters that characterise dynamical analysis of blood pressure and heart rate may stimulate new ideas for the future among people working in this field.

Marco Di Rienzo

Giuseppe Mancia

Gianfranco Parati

Antonio Pedotti

Alberto Zanchetti

* “Computer Analysis of the Blood Pressure Signal. Research and Clinical Applications” a satellite symposium to the V European Meeting on Hypertension. Verona, 1991.