To estimate the Hurst exponent of a mono-fractal process, the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) is based on the estimation of the trend of the integrated process. The latter is subtracted from the integrated process. The power of the residual is then computed and corresponds to the square of the fluctuation function. Its logarithm is proportional to the Hurst exponent. In the last few years, a few variants of this method have been proposed and differ in the way of estimating the trend. Our contribution in this paper is threefold. First, we introduce a new variant of the DFA, based on a regularized least-square criterion to estimate the trend. Then, the influence of the regularization parameter on the fluctuation function is analyzed in two cases: when the process is wide sense stationary and when it is not. Finally, an application is presented in the field of aeronautics to characterize an attentional impairment: the visual tunneling.