| Summary: | The human cardiovascular system governs the heart rate and blood pressure. A neural sensor called the baroreceptor is controlled by the the blood pressure; the sensitivity of its reflex is important in determining the cause of hypertension. This sensitivity may be obtained from the coupled fluctuations of blood pressure and heart rate time series. However, the current method used assumes locally linear coupling of the heart rate and blood pressure, which has been shown to be nonlinear. In this dissertation we apply this current method to sample data, investigate improvements and, having gained further insight into the cardiovascular system from models of the system, offer an alternative method of measuring the baroreceptor relex sensitivity.
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