This paper proposes a new method for the automatic detection of atrial fibrillation (AF), using Markov regime switching GARCH (1, 1) model. The proposed method is based on the observation that variability patterns of heart rate intervals during AF significantly differ from regular patterns. The proposed method captures the different patterns of heart rate intervals between two regimes : normal and AF states. We test the proposed method using Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) atrial fibrillation database, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.