The Way You Breathe Is Unique to You, Like a Fingerprint, New Study Suggests
Researchers could identify people with almost 97 percent accuracy based on 24 hours of their recorded breathing patterns, and they also found links to a person’s mental and physical condition
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Your fingerprints, the ridges on your tongue and the patterns on your irises are all unique to you. Now, researchers say your breathing pattern over the course of a day could be added to that list.
A new study published in the journal Current Biology last week found that people can be reliably identified by their breathing pattern alone. And these patterns seem to be correlated with indicators of physical and mental health.
Breathing is regulated by the brain—each inhale and exhale you take triggers electrical activity in neurons. Respiration is connected to several brain areas, including those related to cognition, emotions and memory. “We hypothesized, brains are unique, ergo breathing patterns would also be unique,” says Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and study co-author, to Veronique Greenwood at the New York Times.
To test this hypothesis, Sobel and his team developed a wearable device that tracks nasal airflow over 24 hours, recording details like the duration of each breath, time between breaths and the amount of air passing through each nostril. The study’s 100 participants wore the device while going about their daily routines and logging their activities in an app.
The scientists were able to identify the participants based on their breathing patterns with 96.8 percent accuracy using a machine learning program. And that level of accuracy was consistent across retests spanning two years, which also allowed the researchers to further train their algorithm.
“It’s very rare that you can predict a biological process so accurately,” says Sobel to Olivia Ferrari at National Geographic.
Your breath could also tell people other things about you. The researchers found that certain breathing patterns correlated with other traits, such as body mass index and levels of depression and anxiety. People who scored higher on anxiety questionnaires, for instance, had shorter inhales and more varied pauses in breath during sleep. Those with higher depression scores tended to exhale more quickly.
“It’s a very cool study,” says Artin Arshamian, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who was not involved in the work, to Humberto Basilio at Nature.
Still, most of the participants had low scores on the questionnaires. Some researchers note that future work should test the method on more people. “This is a super exciting finding, but someone needs to show it also works for other [groups],” Detlef Heck, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the research, tells National Geographic. “But in general, I think this is a very promising direction.”
The team says their results suggest long-term breath monitoring could serve as a diagnostic tool for a person’s mental or physical state. And one day, it might even teach scientists how to treat certain conditions by regulating breathing.
“We intuitively assume that how depressed or anxious you are changes the way you breathe,” says Sobel in a statement. “But it might be the other way around. Perhaps the way you breathe makes you anxious or depressed. If that’s true, we might be able to change the way you breathe to change those conditions.”
The team is now working on understanding whether mimicking “healthy” breathing patterns can help people improve their well-being. Previous studies by other researchers have also linked breathing and mental health.
Neuroscientists Diego Laplagne and Adriano Tort from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, write in a joint email to the New York Times that it’s difficult to distinguish breathing patterns from the activities people are engaged in, so it could be challenging to implement breath monitoring as a way to diagnose individuals.
This type of observation might also lead to privacy concerns, Sobel says to the outlet, raising the possibility that breathing patterns might one day be covered by privacy protection laws. “But only if you have enough of it,” he says. “Ten minutes is not enough. Twenty-four hours is.”
