I work on a labor and delivery unit. I recorded ten heart rates from the infants that I have assessed ove

I work on a labor and delivery unit. I recorded ten heart rates from the infants that I have assessed over the last three days at work. The heart rates were the following: 112, 128, 132, 136, 136, 140, 140, 142, 148, 158.

In terms of central tendency the mean heart rate is 137. The median heart rate is 138. This is a bimodal set because there are two numbers that appear twice in the data set, 136 and 140. The normal heart rate for an infant is 110-160. There are no outliers in this group of data. There are some things that could cause the variations in heart rate. I took the heart rates of five male infants and five female infants. Male infants typically tend to have lower heart rates than that of female infants. Another variant could be how old the infant was on the day the data was collected. “Heart rate variability changes significantly during the first day of life, particularly during the first 6 h. The significant correlations between HRV and clinical risk variables support the hypothesis that HRV is a good indicator of overall wellbeing of a baby and is sensitive to detect birth-related stress and monitor its resolution over time” (Oliveira et al., 2019).

Insights that I gained from this data were that healthy infants can have a wide variety of heart rates, and after reading this article it their heart rate baseline may change as early as six hours of life. There are many things that may affect heart rates and its variations.

Chamberlain College of Nursing (2020). MATH225N-61668 Statistical Reasoning for the Health Sciences. Week 3 Lesson. Downers Grove, IL: Online Publication.

Oliveira, V., von Rosenberg, W., Montaldo, P., Adjei, T., Mendoza, J., Shivamurthappa, V., Mandic, D., & Thayyil, S. (2019, August 7). Early Postnatal Heart Rate Variability in Healthy Newborn Infants. Frontiers in physiology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6692663/.