Health Wellness Monitoring Using the Scaling Exponent: A Heartbeat Interval Time Series Analysis

Toru Yazawa, Hiroyuki Kitajima

The cardio-vascular control system (CVCS) includes the heart, blood vessels, and neuronal/hormonal regulating systems. Ontogenetically and evolutionally, CVCS is designed, implemented and maintained by multi-cellular components. To endure proper operation as a mixture of different type of cells, CVCS functioning is automated with complex interaction with each other. When a certain state of CVCS becomes a malfunctioned state, physicians acknowledge that CVCS’s sickness might get started even the malfunctioned state is acute and temporary. However, it is not easy to quantify the state of CVCS. Using the scaling exponent (SI, scaling index), we have recently introduced a novel health technology to check CVCS’s state, which is “modified detrended fluctuation analysis (mDFA)”. mDFA-method simply calculates SI based on the electrocardiogram data. If our health wellness conditions are practically healthy, SI is nearly 1.0. If we bear a stressful condition, the value of SI decreases toward to 0.5. Intriguingly, if we would be at risk, for example, we are approaching unpredictable cessation of heart-pumping, we found that SI increase toward 1.5. This mDFA-rule is beneficial and applicable to “hearted” animals, from crustaceans to humans. Here we propose that mDFA can distinguish between healthiness and sickness of CVCS.

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