QRS detection is very important in cardiovascular disease diagnosis and ECG (electrocardiogram) monitor, because it is the precondition of the calculation of correlative parameters and diagnosis. This paper presents a non-parametric derivative-based method for R wave detection in ECG signal. This method firstly uses a digital filter to cut out noises from ECG signals, utilizes local polynomial fitting that is a non-parametric derivative-based method to estimate the derivative values, and then selects appropriate thresholds by the difference, and the algorithm adaptively adjusts the size of thresholds periodically according to the different needs. Afterwards, the position of R wave is detected by the estimation of the first-order derivative values with nonparametric local polynomial statistical model. In addition, in order to improve the accuracy of detection, the method of redundant detection and missing detection are applied in this paper. The clinical experimental data are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm. Experimental results show that the method in the process of the detection of R wave is much smoother, compared with differential threshold algorithm and it can detect the R wave in the ECG signals accurately.