The base-scale entropy analysis of short-term heart rate variability signal

The complexity of heart rate variability (HRV) signal can reflect physiological functions and healthy status of heart system. Detecting complexity of the short-term HRV signal has an important practical meaning. We introduce the base-scale entropy method to analyze the complexity of time series. The advantages of our method are its simplicity, extremely fast calculation for very short data and anti-noise characteristic. For the well-known chaotic dynamical system—logistic map, it is shown that our complexity behaves similarly to Lyapunov exponents, and is especially effective in the presence of random Gaussian noise. This paper addresses the use of base-scale entropy method to 3 low-dimensional nonlinear deterministic systems. At last, we apply this idea to short-term HRV signal, and the result shows the method could robustly identify patterns generated from healthy and pathologic states, as well as aging. The base-scale entropy can provide convenience in practically applications.