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Inspector Workflows

Six end-to-end recipes for the most common Inspector tasks. Each workflow lists the exact menu items and keyboard shortcuts to use, so you can follow it without prior tool familiarity.

For the underlying feature reference see Inspector features. For the Streamlit web app side, see Workflow.

1. Quick review of a single recording

You just received one .rrational file and want to eyeball the data quality before kicking off any analysis.

  1. File → Open project… and pick the project root (or skip if you are working without a project).
  2. Drop the file into data/processed/ if it isn't already there.
  3. Double-click the file in the workspace tree or use File → Open recent file….
  4. Press R to reset the zoom to the full recording.
  5. Press Z to enter Zen mode (HUD + crosshair off) for a clean look.
  6. Skim the tachogram. Press 1 to drill into the last 1 min if something looks suspicious, then 3 to zoom back out.
  7. If you spot a bad stretch, press E and drag-select the range — the warm-gray stripe records the exclusion automatically.

Time budget: 2–3 minutes per recording.

2. Multi-participant survey

You have a folder of recordings and need to know which ones are high quality and which need rework.

  1. Open the project — every detected file shows in the Data tab.
  2. Tools → Run preprocessing on all loaded recordings… to detect artifacts across the whole batch.
  3. When the batch finishes, the Quality triage dashboard opens. Sort by artifact percentage to find the worst recordings.
  4. Switch to the Participants tab — the participant grid shows thumbnails of every recording.
  5. Click a thumbnail to load that recording into the main view. Do a 30-second visual sanity check, then move to the next.
  6. Mark any unrecoverable recordings as excluded via the Data tab's per-row context menu.

Time budget: 1 minute per recording in the grid.

3. Group comparison

You want to visually compare two experimental groups before running formal statistics.

  1. Make sure every recording is tagged with its group (Setup tab → Groups pane → assign participants to a group).
  2. Open Tools → Compare HRV curves….
  3. In the dialog:
  4. Check the recordings for Group A.
  5. Check the recordings for Group B.
  6. Leave Confidence level at 95% unless your protocol differs.
  7. Click Plot. The overlay opens in a new window with mean curves plus bootstrap CI bands.
  8. Look for non-overlapping bands as a visual cue, then confirm any differences formally in the Analysis tab.

The Compare-curves overlay is a visual sanity check, not a hypothesis test — always run the Analysis tab's between-group test before reporting any difference.

4. Detailed review of one participant

A specific recording needs careful, beat-by-beat inspection.

  1. Load the recording in the Participant tab.
  2. On the right, the Preprocessing panel runs the Lipponen 2019 detector when you click Detect. Orange X markers are flagged beats.
  3. Press H to bring up the HUD readout — hover the cursor over a flagged beat to read off its t / RR / HR instantly.
  4. Switch the panel to Manual mark mode to click individual beats that the detector missed.
  5. Press A and drag a range over any region where you want to leave a written note — the magenta annotation stripe is saved per-recording.
  6. Tick Use corrected RR values to switch the plot to the interpolated series.
  7. Click Save as .rrational to write a v2 export with the corrections baked in.

5. Presentation mode

Building a slide deck or recording a video walkthrough.

  1. Press F11 to enter fullscreen.
  2. Press Z for Zen mode — no HUD, no crosshair, just data.
  3. Set the zoom to whatever window you want to show (1 / 2 / 3 or manual scroll).
  4. Use the OS screenshot tool, or for video, your screen-recording app of choice. The Inspector is single-window so there are no floating palettes in the recording.
  5. Press Z again to bring the HUD back when you need to read off exact values during the recording.

Tip: switch to the light color scheme under Edit → Preferences → Color Scheme for projector visibility.

6. Exploratory analysis

You want to poke around without committing to a hypothesis yet.

  1. Open the project and a recording.
  2. Use the Overview bar to scrub freely — drag the viewport rectangle, zoom by dragging its edges.
  3. Try every visualization in the Tools → Visualisation submenu: Tachogram, Poincare plot, PSD plot, HR distribution. Each opens in its own window so you can have several up at once.
  4. If something looks interesting, annotate it (A + drag) for future reference.
  5. Use Tools → Annotations… to open the cross-recording table; sort and filter to surface patterns across your dataset.

Inspector vs. Streamlit — best-practice cheat sheet

Task Inspector Streamlit
Visual review of one recording Best OK
Per-beat artifact correction Best Limited
Compare HRV curves visually Best OK
Compute HRV metrics for one file Good Good
Group statistics (Friedman, RM-ANOVA) Good Best
Publication-ready HTML report Good Best
Quality triage across a folder Best OK
Reproducible CI/CD pipeline Limited Best

Both apps share the same project/config/ folder, so you can switch between them without conversion.

See also