The accurate detection of R-wave is important for other feature extraction in ECG, and R-wave has a lot of medical information about heart. Numerous R-wave detection algorithms have been studied on the ECG signal shape analysis, but it was difficult to find accurate R-wave when the shape of R-wave is similar to the shape of P-wave. This paper presents an R-wave detection method based on the refractory period that is the period of depolarization and repolarization of the cell membrane after excitation. And we also use the shape of kurtosis in the refractory period. The proposed method is validated using the ECG records of the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms other method in case of 105 and 108 record that have R-wave similar to P-wave, as well as other records.