Nonlinear science research is a hot point in the world. It has deepened our cognition of determinism and randomicity, simplicity and complexity, noise and order and it will profoundly influence the progress of the study of natural science, including life science.Life is the most complex nonlinear system and heart is the core of lifecycle system. In the late more than 20 years, nonlinear research on heart electric activities has made much headway. The commonly used parameters are based on chaos and fractal theory, such as correlation dimension, Lyapunov exponent, Kolmogorov entropy and multifractal singularity spectrum. This paper summarizes the commonly used methods in the nonlinear study of heart electric signal. Then, considering the shortages of the above traditional nonlinear parameters, we mainly introduce the results on short-term heart rate variability (HRV) signal (500 R-R intervals) and HFECG signal (1-2s). Finally, we point out it is worthwhile to put emphasis on the study of the sensitive nonlinearity parameters of short-term heart electric signal and their dynamic character and clinical effectivity.