Your breathing patterns are unique to you – and could be linked to your weight and mental health
By Helen Thomson
12 June 2025
Monitoring people’s breathing could help diagnose, or even treat, various conditions
Milan Jovic/Getty Images
Forget facial recognition – there could be a new way to identify you. Researchers have discovered that we all seem to have a “respiratory fingerprint”, a unique way of breathing that could revolutionise how we diagnose and treat various health conditions, from obesity to depression.
The breakthrough comes from Timna Soroka at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and her colleagues, who have developed a wearable device that captures the subtle nuances of how we breathe.
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“This [work] is thrilling. It addresses many longstanding questions about how respiratory signals relate to health and mental state – all in one body of work,” says Torben Noto, who wasn’t involved in the research, at Osmo in New York, an AI company aiming to give computers a sense of smell.
The idea that breathing patterns contain health information isn’t new – work dating back to the 1950s hints at this connection. But without a wearable device that could record nasal breathing data as a person moves around, 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 wearable device and gave it to 97 people who wore it for 24 hours. They then trained an algorithm to recognise unique combinations of 24 parameters – everything from the volume of air breathed in to how often breath-holding occurred. The algorithm could identify the participants with almost 97 per cent accuracy, and this signature remained stable over a two-year follow-up period.