Oscillations in the evaluation of fractal dimension of RR intervals time series.

Previously, we have reported the presence of oscillations in the graphs we have used to evaluate the Higuchi's fractal dimension in RR intervals time series of congestive heart failure (CHF) patients in the sleep phase but these oscillations hardly appear in all the six hours of the awake phase. In this paper we report the same analysis for heart rate time series for different groups of healthy subjects; we are looking for the presence of this kind of oscillations in other situations. We analyzed all the time series in the Exaggerated Heart Rate Oscillations database of Physionet during two meditation techniques: volunteers with spontaneous breathing, subjects in meditation, volunteers in a metronomic breathing group and elite athletes. We have found oscillations in the graphs of the Higuchi's fractal dimension in the heart rate time series of subjects in meditation and metronomic breathing and this fact coincides with previous reported results.