Fractal behavior of the electrocardiogram: distinguishing heart-failure and normal patients using wavelet analysis

Heart-failure patients can be identified by computing certain statistics of the sequence of heartbeats, such as the Allan factor (AF) and its generalization, the wavelet Allan factor (WAF). These measures successfully determine whether a given patient suffers from heart failure or not. They succeed because they are jointly sensitive to both short-term, and long-term fractal, characteristics of the heartbeat time series.