{"id":297212,"date":"2025-06-16T14:43:01","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T14:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/aerospace\/the-way-you-breathe-is-unique-to-you-like-a-fingerprint-new-study-suggests\/"},"modified":"2025-06-16T14:43:01","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T14:43:01","slug":"the-way-you-breathe-is-unique-to-you-like-a-fingerprint-new-study-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=297212","title":{"rendered":"The Way You Breathe Is Unique to You, Like a Fingerprint, New Study Suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"


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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\u2019s mental and physical condition<\/h2>\n
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Sara Hashemi<\/a><\/p>\n

– Daily Correspondent<\/span><\/p>\n

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Researchers developed a wearable device to monitor participants’ breathing.
\n Soroka et al., Current Biology<\/em>, 2025<\/span>
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Your fingerprints, the ridges on your tongue and the patterns on your irises are all unique to you<\/a>. Now, researchers say your breathing pattern over the course of a day could be added to that list.<\/p>\n

A new study published in the journal Current Biology<\/em><\/a><\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Breathing is regulated by the brain\u2014each inhale and exhale you take triggers electrical activity in neurons. Respiration is connected to several brain areas<\/a>, including those related to cognition, emotions and memory. \u201cWe hypothesized, brains are unique, ergo breathing patterns would also be unique,\u201d says Noam Sobel<\/a>, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and study co-author, to Veronique Greenwood at the New York Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

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, <\/strong>time between breaths <\/strong>and the amount of air passing through each nostril. The study\u2019s 100 participants wore the device while going about their daily routines and logging their activities in an app.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very rare that you can predict a biological process so accurately,\u201d says Sobel to Olivia Ferrari at National Geographic<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very cool study,\u201d says Artin Arshamian<\/a>, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who was not involved in the work, to Humberto Basilio at Nature<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Still, most of the participants had low scores on the questionnaires. Some researchers note that future work should test the method on more people. \u201cThis is a super exciting finding, but someone needs to show it also works for other [groups],\u201d Detlef Heck<\/a>, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the research, tells National Geographic<\/em>. \u201cBut in general, I think this is a very promising direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team says their results suggest long-term breath monitoring could serve as a diagnostic tool for a person\u2019s mental or physical state. And one day, it might even teach scientists how to treat certain conditions by regulating breathing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe intuitively assume that how depressed or anxious you are changes the way you breathe,\u201d says Sobel in a statement<\/a>. \u201cBut it might be the other way around. Perhaps the way you breathe makes you anxious or depressed. If that\u2019s true, we might be able to change the way you breathe to change those conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team is now working on understanding whether mimicking \u201chealthy\u201d breathing patterns can help people improve their well-being. Previous studies by other researchers have also linked breathing and mental health<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Neuroscientists Diego Laplagne<\/a> and Adriano Tort<\/a> from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil,\u00a0write in a joint email to the New York Times<\/em> that it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cBut only if you have enough of it,\u201d he says. \u201cTen minutes is not enough. Twenty-four hours is.\u201d<\/p>\n

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