How you breathe could reveal a lot about your health

Forget facial recognition – there could be a new way to identify yourself. The researchers have discovered that we all seem to have a “respiratory imprint”, a unique way of breathing which could revolutionize the way in which we diagnose and deal with various health conditions, from obesity to depression.

The breakthrough comes from Timna Soroka at the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Israel and his colleagues, who have developed a portable apparatus that captures the subtle nuances of the way we breathe.

“This [work] is exciting. He addresses many long -standing questions about how respiratory signals relate to health and mental state – everything in a set of work, “explains Torben Noto, which was not involved in research in New York, an AI company aimed at giving computers a smell.

The idea that respiratory models contain information on health is not new – work dating back to the 1950s alludes to this connection. But without a portable device that could record nasal breathing data as a person moves, research was limited to data collected from hospital patients, who tend to have their breathing monitored for less than an hour.

To get around this, Soroka and her colleagues created a portable device and gave it to 97 people who wore it for 24 hours. They then led to an algorithm to recognize unique combinations of 24 parameters – everything, of the volume of air, inspired the frequency in which the breath occurred. The algorithm could identify the participants with an accuracy of almost 97%, and this signature remained stable over a two -year follow -up period.

Nevertheless, “do not expect a nasal air flow to record the next time you go to the bank,” explains the member of the Noam Sobel team, also at the Weizmann Institute. The objective is not to use the device for biometrics, he says, but rather to unlock valuable health information.

For example, the body mass index of a person (BMI) could be predicted by a combination of parameters of the nasal cycle, the rhythm in which each nostril alternates between being more or less open than the other.

This cycle is governed by the balance of your sympathetic nervous system, which prepares the body for a response of “fight or flight”, and the parasympathetic system, which calms the body, says Sobel. “So, by measuring the air flow in your nostrils, you actually gain a measure of your sympathetic excitement, and that seems to be a predictor of the BMI.”

This raises an intriguing possibility, says Sobel: rather than the weight gain causing respiratory changes, could the respiratory patterns influence the weight? “If it’s true, we will find the breathing model that makes you thin and our whole group will retire and will be put on an island,” he said.

The respiratory data also revealed correlations between the aspects of breathing and levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. People who had high levels of depressive symptoms inhaled faster, for example.

The team now examines if the respiratory patterns really cause these symptoms, to see if they can be used to diagnose certain current mental health problems, which could then be treated via respiratory exercises.

“It is not difficult to imagine a future where each patient receives a nasal air flow monitoring system that follows treatment, provides comments and predicts results for a range of disorders,” explains Noto, who proposed the 24 measures that the team used to measure different aspects of breathing. A device could also help individuals recognize when their breathing deviates from normal. “It has the potential to have a huge impact on human health,” says Noto.