Breathing into a bag or tube usually means you’ve been pulled over by the police who want to check for drinking and driving.
But a team of scientists have found every breath you take to be like a fingerprint that discloses who you are with 97% accuracy and can be assessed for “insights” into physical, and even mental, health.
“You would think that breathing has been measured and analysed in every way,” commented lead investigator and PhD student Timna Soroka from the Weizmann Institute of Science near Tel Aviv, Israel.
She shared that she and her colleagues had “stumbled upon a completely new way to look at respiration” that they describe as “a brain readout”.
The researchers tracked breathing in 100 “healthy young adults” over 24 hours using a “lightweight wearable device” they had made.
They found that the “high-level accuracy” of the tests “remained consistent across multiple retests conducted over a two-year period”.
Most breathing tests last less than half an hour, meaning such “brief snapshots” cannot assess “subtle patterns”, note the team, which had its findings published in the science journal Current Biology.
“I thought it would be really hard to identify someone because everyone is doing different things, like running, studying or resting,” Soroka said.
But according to the team, the breathing test rivals “the precision of some voice recognition technologies”.
“It turns out their breathing patterns were remarkably distinct,” Soroka said, following the longer-than-usual test, which not only could identify people, but also provide signals related to health.
The researchers said that the tests showed breathing to be “correlated with a person’s body mass index, sleep-wake cycle, levels of depression and anxiety, and even behavioural traits”.
“For example, participants who scored relatively higher on anxiety questionnaires had shorter inhales and more variability in the pauses between breaths during sleep,” they reported.
The team’s prior investigations of olfaction in animals got them thinking that since mammals’ brains process odour information during inhalation, there could be some value in testing whether there people have a unique breathing pattern in the same way each brain is unique.
The findings follow the development over the past decade of gadgets that can identify people by how they walk, with so-called gait recognition technology used by police in China in street cameras since at least 2018.
It all means that with every breath you take and every move you make, they might some day be watching – and identifying – you. – dpa
