A medical device performs a method for computing an estimate of a physiological variable. The method includes sensing a physiological signal and measuring an event of the physiological signal. The device initializes a value of a long-term metric of the event measurement, wherein the long-term metric corresponds to a time interval correlated to a response time of the physiological variable to changes in the event. The estimate of the long-term metric is updated in a memory of the medical device using a previous long-term metric and a current measurement of the event. The device detects a need for computing the physiological variable and computes an estimate of the physiological variable using the updated long-term metric.
