This article surveys the literature over the period 2003-2021 on heart-based biometric protocols. In particular, we focus on how the heart signal is transformed from a continuous wave to discrete values to be used afterwards in authentication protocols. We explain and classify the surveyed proposals according to three main parameters: i) the dataset they use for testing their results; ii) the delineation algorithms they use to extract the fiducial points, and; iii) the cryptographic tests they run (if any) to validate how random the extracted token is.