New Paper in Psychophysiology on a Protocol for Measuring Infant Heart Rate Variability in Rohingya Camps

Can something as delicate as heart rate variability be measured reliably outside a lab, in a refugee camp?

Most of what we know about how infants regulate stress and arousal comes from studies conducted in quiet, controlled settings with highly resourced families. That gap has limited how much developmental psychophysiology actually reflects all of the populations it aims to understand.

In our new paper, part of a special issue published by Psychophysiology on diversity and representation, we present and test a protocol for collecting heart rate variability (HRV) data from 1-month-old infants in the Rohingya camps and surrounding host communities in the district of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. HRV is a key marker of parasympathetic nervous system function, closely tied to infants' capacity for self-regulation and social engagement.

Across 148 infants, the protocol produced usable data in the vast majority of cases — 86% when infants were held by their mothers and 80% when infants were alone — with physiological patterns matching what theory predicts. The result is a scalable, ethical model for bringing this kind of research to communities that have historically been left out of it.

This work is part of iRRRd, our longitudinal study of Intergenerational Risk and Resilience of Rohingya in Displacement. 

Thanks to Elisa Ugarte, Paul D. Hastings, Eamam Hossain, Md Shakil Ahamed, A. K. Rahim, Mahbub Elahi, Md Sajjadur Rahman, Fahmida Tofail, and Alice Wuermli for your work and expertise, which made this protocol possible in our study with Rohingya and host community families in Bangladesh.

Read the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.70356