Statistical analysis of the spontaneously emitted photon signals from palm and dorsal sides of both hands in human subjects

Photon signals emitted spontaneously from dorsal and palm sides of both hands were recorded using 6000 time windows of size T = 50 ms in 50 healthy human subjects. These photon signals demonstrated universal behaviour by variance and mean. The data sets for larger time windows up to T = 50 s were obtained by merging the data recorded with T = 50 ms. The behaviour of Fano factor regarding different window sizes was investigated. The Fano factor hovered around one in signals up to T = 3 s and increased slowly with the increase in window size. This indicated super-Poissonian distribution of photo counts. The Fano factor curve F(T) obtained by averaging all subjects and locations had a characteristic shape. Data suggest that the shape is essentially a combination of a smaller sub-population of individuals with sub-Poissonian and a larger sub-population with predominantly super-Poissonian photo count distribution. Averaging the data obtained by randomly shuffling observed data sets was flat and did not show any structure with T. The same applied both to the observed background data sets and the data sets obtained by randomly shuffling background in 50 measurements. The Fano factor was also flat in 50 measurements documented both by a standard LED as well as its shuffled data sets. The structure in the shape F(T) is characteristic of human signals. It may contain valuable information about metabolic processes and may have diagnostic relevance. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.