How you breathe is like a fingerprint that can identify you

119 points by XzetaU8 3 weeks ago | 85 comments
  • meindnoch 2 weeks ago
    True privacy freaks use a diaphragm pacemaker hooked to a CSPRNG to securely randomize their breathing pattern in public.

    Also, make sure to use a different CSPRNG for your gait randomizer, to avoid entropy starvation.

    • reginald78 2 weeks ago
      Random pattern would make you stick out, particularly when everyone else in the area has identifiable breathing patterns. You'll want to set your diaphragm pacemaker to mimic the most common breathing pattern, probably based on a sample of breathing patterns from your geographical area.
      • tetris11 2 weeks ago
        Some people would pay good money to have the breath profile of an athlete, in order to qualify them for only the best of careers.
        • m463 2 weeks ago
          Well, you'd get turned away at all-you-can-eat buffets.
      • kridsdale1 2 weeks ago
        Breathe without rhythm

        And you won’t attract the worm

        • iwontberude 2 weeks ago
          We need a way to get quantum entangled particles delivered to various parts of our bodies for ultimate privacy guarantees.
          • jcims 2 weeks ago
            Just carry a chihuahua around in a backpack. Problem solved!
            • UltraSane 2 weeks ago
              Just use a wheelchair
            • tbrownaw 2 weeks ago
              > When 42 of the participants came back to the laboratory weeks, months and even two years later, to take part in another 24-hour measurement, the trained algorithm could identify them from their breath patterns. Data from periods when the participants were awake gave more accurate results than did those from sleeping periods, but when the researchers used a 100-parameter characterization of a full data set instead of one using 24 parameters, they could pick individuals out with 96.8% accuracy.

              The correctly identified .968x42=40.696 of the participants.

              Also any standard-ish physical activity that comes with instructions usually includes breathing in those instructions. So I would expect results to vary substantially depending on where they found the study participants.

              • BLKNSLVR 2 weeks ago
                This is probably more 'voice' than breathing, but when I'm in the toilet cubicle at work I try to identify anyone who may be next door by the sound of their breathing.

                I rarely get to confirm whether I'm right or wrong, but everyone sounds slightly different.

                • matthewwolfe 2 weeks ago
                  This is the real reason why people like remote work.
                  • Aachen 2 weeks ago
                    This wasn't a reason for me until reading this is even a thing. I hadn't realised someone would be listening this closely... but no thoughtcrime, so I guess to each their own. What I don't know doesn't hurt me, just don't tell me such thoughts...
                    • BLKNSLVR 2 weeks ago
                      My sincere apologies if this causes you additional anxiety.

                      I only do it for my own amusement. I don't inflict my "guessing" upon my colleagues, no one knows. For me, it's a lesson in working out "how may I maximise my anonymity".

                      I generally respect the "polite silence" rule upon entering the ceramic room - someone else must break the rule before I will.

                      Don't read on if it literally will cause more anxiety.

                      I was in a different 'cubicle' and noticed that the shadows meant I could see that the person next to me was using their phone, so now that's an additional consideration for minimising my identifiable footprint on the throne.

                    • 2 weeks ago
                      • sunrunner 2 weeks ago
                        The only time I ever truly felt comfortable in an office environment, and now that’s been ruined.

                        “Mark? Is that you?”

                        “…Tim?”

                        “Yeah, any update on the report?”

                        “…”

                        “OK, no problem buddy”

                        • chairmansteve 2 weeks ago
                          Especially in America, where public toilet privacy is not a thing.
                        • bilekas 2 weeks ago
                          As someone with bathroom stage fright from time to time, this is terrifying.
                          • jcims 2 weeks ago
                            Try plugging your ears. For some reason it works like magic for me to get rid of that stage fright.
                            • veb 2 weeks ago
                              That makes it worse! Then people can sneak up on you :(
                              • bilekas 2 weeks ago
                                Hands free? That’s a skill I haven’t perfected yet.
                            • SketchySeaBeast 2 weeks ago
                              And this is why I have absolutely no reservations about going loud in the stall.
                              • BLKNSLVR 2 weeks ago
                                When I go loud it's not generally something I'm in control of. This is happening, make your peace with it.
                            • bradley13 2 weeks ago
                              Including asymmetry between the nostrils brings in physiological factors other than breathing, i.e. sinuses, etc..

                              Still, I can see it. My wife and I are probably equally fit, but she breathes much faster than I do. I also notice that I sometimes don't take a breath (or feel any need to) for several seconds, if I'm being sedentary.

                              • meindnoch 2 weeks ago
                                >I also notice that I sometimes don't take a breath (or feel any need to) for several seconds, if I'm being sedentary.

                                Normal adult breathing rate is 12-20 per minute. So by the pigeonhole principle, if you don't pause breathing for several seconds when idle, then you're breathing too fast than what's considered normal. Your wife is hyperventilating, which could be a sign of stress, or a compensatory reaction to metabolic acidosis.

                                • dpassens 2 weeks ago
                                  Or you could take long breaths. 20 breaths per minute is only four seconds per breath which doesn't seem terribly long if it's both in- and out-breath.
                              • eimrine 3 weeks ago
                                I have noticed that I need so much fresh air while sleeping that it is not very comfortable for me to sleep with another person. I can not say anything about breath patterns but I suspect that O2 consumption has to be among those patterns.
                                • stapedium 2 weeks ago
                                  I suspect the fresh air is more an issue with temperature and humidity rather than oxygen content. Try a fan first.
                                  • NoPicklez 2 weeks ago
                                    That seems like a bit of an assumption.

                                    Your body needs less O2 when sleeping and your respiratory rate slows as a result of that and many factors.

                                    I highly doubt someone sleeping next to you is materially taking away from the O2 you're breathing in. If so, you'd be fairly out of breath in a room full of people during the day.

                                    Unless the room you're sleeping in already has such low level of O2, you might need to look into a monitor or even using a fan to move some air.

                                    • dudeinjapan 2 weeks ago
                                      I always have to tell my girlfriend to stop hogging all the O2.
                                      • zeristor 3 weeks ago
                                        Does an open window help?

                                        A CO2 monitor might be helpful too?

                                      • qwertox 2 weeks ago
                                        You could strap a band with a strong magnet around your tummy and have an IMU sensor below your mattress. It was a project I started and sampled it at 1 Hz, multisampled with min/max/avg, but I never did anything with the data.

                                        Looking at the real-time stream the breathing was noticeable, at 2Hz it would probably be very useful, if you have the dedication to write the tools to analyze the data.

                                        I was thinking about doing this with a fanny pack where I put the sensor and battery pack in the fanny pack and a strong magnet at the opposite side of the strip in order to measure my breathing frequency during excercising.

                                        • jackschultz 2 weeks ago
                                          I've been curious about what the best way to recording breathing rates with wearables would be. Thought was a chest strap with springs to measure tension with higher tension being air in lungs. But you're talking about a different way. How does the magnet work to get rates? I'd want something that can get rates and volumes from mouth vs nasal and also tell which vent the air in coming into the lungs from. Probably a case of how much intrusion you want vs how intricate and correct the data is.
                                        • XzetaU8 3 weeks ago
                                          • CrimsonCape 2 weeks ago
                                            I believe that I and everyone "vibrate at a certain frequency" which I define loosely as the qualitative electrical/emotional impulses that drive daily mood and physiology. Like the baseline is a smooth sine wave of calmness. Some people seem agitated all the time, and I guarantee their frequency is vibrating at a higher hertz.

                                            Driving home from work, I get at least 2-3 "shocks" when other drivers cause close calls. I flinch, get a surge of adrenaline, and have to breathe to calm down. My sine wave is disturbed. Let's say a driver swerved close to my vehicle and I flinch and swerve away.

                                            The next day, a driver drifts close and I instinctively get a shock, flinch, and swerve away. I didn't intend to be jumpy and nervous, but apparently my electrical system is still "echoing" from the day before.

                                            At work, I experience anxiety, and it's a "softer" shock, but the long term result is nervousness, twitching, holding my breath in anticipation (of an attack that never comes), feelings of dread.

                                            People talk about fixing upset emotional states and psychology, but in thinking about this, I characterize my own problems as needing my electrical system tuned-up.

                                            How often did a farmer 1000 years ago get adrenaline dumps from fast-twitch motor neurons as he zoomed 80mph down the highway? And yet now it's literally all day. Vehicle noise at 4am, jump awake. Phone rings, jump and flinch. Driving, etc.

                                            I don't think we look often enough at the physiology of stress from the perspective of the electrical signals generated by the nervous system. It seems like all kinds of problems come from it. To the article's point, I know my breathing has been affected from stress and tensions. I don't think i'm particularly unhealthy, so I think a lot of people could relate to feeling "not-unhealthy" but also really twitchy and disturbed from stress and tension.

                                            In my thinking about this, fitness and health come from creating the electrical impulses in a steady, predictable way (i.e. walking, lifting) such that the electrical pathway can remember it's baseline frequency and "strengthen" the good frequency. And hopefully smooth-out the peaks and valleys of the signal interruptions caused by stresses.

                                            • dbtc 2 weeks ago
                                              I wonder if one were to use e.g. a gardening metaphor to conceptualize their perceived inner state, rather than an electricity metaphor, all things being otherwise the same, would their thoughts calm down and nervousness subside?

                                              This is a hypothesis.

                                              It might be true that electrical signals and magnetic frequencies define something fundamental about our physical reality, but don't underestimate utilitarian power of imagination and metaphor.

                                              Think about trees, feel better.

                                              • 2 weeks ago
                                              • kylehotchkiss 2 weeks ago
                                                Ah good, retailers will figure out a way to work this into their camera processing software! Just like gait tracking can help ID somebody if they're wearing a mask.
                                                • pchew 2 weeks ago
                                                  Pebble in the shoe, pebble in the nostril.
                                                  • reginald78 2 weeks ago
                                                    I know masks and ICP makeup were suggested as anti face recognition tools. Did anyone actually test pebble in the shoe? I would have thought clothing to hide the gait would be the answer, burkas or JNCO jeans.
                                                • tantalor 2 weeks ago
                                                  > custom, wearable device that records airflow through each of a person’s nostrils

                                                  Yeah, it turns out if you can strap a device to somebody then wow you can identify them.

                                                  This is interesting, but not a big surprise!

                                                  Now if they can do this from an external passive sensor like a camera or microphone, then yeah that would be a neat result.

                                                  • crusty 2 weeks ago
                                                    I thought those millimeter wave sensors that are used in newer home automation devices to detect when people are in an observable area have enough resolution to detect the displacement of the chest during breathing, which would suggest that the tech you fear is already here, it's just not configured to record and analyze the data YET.
                                                • guzik 2 weeks ago
                                                  I might be missing something, but is there any _practical_ value in this line of research beyond academic curiosity? I've stumbled across this article a few times already, and still can't quite find the real-world application where you'd want to identify someone just by their breathing pattern (especially considering that from the article that "you need to be equipped with a nasal cannula"). Maybe I'm being dense?
                                                  • etskinner 2 weeks ago
                                                    If you can figure out a way to do without the nasal cannula, the possibilities are huge. Maybe a good IR camera could look at the air coming out of your nose and determine the velocity. Seems like it's actually already a thing [1].

                                                    Cynically, you could use it for surveillance, similar to how they do face recognition or temperature scanning in airports.

                                                    The flip side of the coin is that it could be used for better authentication or medical purposes. Maybe your oxygen tank could realize you're breathing different than usual to warn you that you might be having a seizure, stroke, or heart attack. Or maybe we'd have "breathe to sign in" similar to FaceID

                                                    [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/J_EBMhrinNc

                                                    • IshKebab 2 weeks ago
                                                      I think it's just out of interest. There doesn't necessarily need to be a practical application.
                                                      • rebolek 2 weeks ago
                                                        "you need to be equipped with a nasal cannula" now. In few years, who knows. And then, spies.
                                                      • thenewwazoo 2 weeks ago
                                                        Neato. I bet this could be trained to identify/differentiate people based on mmWave sensors, which can reliably detect breathing and muscle movements.
                                                        • macawfish 2 weeks ago
                                                          There are dozens if not hundreds of papers on exactly this topic :)
                                                        • ortusdux 2 weeks ago
                                                          • vismit2000 2 weeks ago
                                                            Related: Detection from breathing audio data - A Three-Fold Machine Learning Approach for Detection of COVID-19 from Audio Data: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-86970-0_...
                                                            • b0a04gl 2 weeks ago
                                                              96.8% accuracy sounds impressive until you realise they skipped the REM phase like it's a bug report. "user unpredictable when dreaming, exclude from dataset." also love how your breath is now a biometric. imagine getting locked out of your account because you had a cold or ran up stairs. future's looking wheezy
                                                              • Aachen 2 weeks ago
                                                                > imagine getting locked out of your account because you had a cold or ran up stairs. future's looking wheezy

                                                                This is me trying to use our fucking touchscreen stove

                                                                Landlord's kitchen, I didn't know this was even an option until moving in here or I'd have asked some questions about wet hands. I'd not have thought to ask about cold hands, like when I held a freezer product for a minute, though

                                                                I'd think it a mere annoyance if there was a physical OFF button. There is not. You can go to the cellar and trip the breaker I guess? Otherwise, you better have reasonably warm and dry fingers (it can deal with a bit of moisture and chill, but has limits similar to trying to use a phone in the rain)

                                                                Gotta say it looks sleek though, when it's free of fingerprints and other usage marks

                                                                I love technology

                                                                • encom 2 weeks ago
                                                                  Your post triggered a deep seething hatred in me of stoves with touch anything. Last place I lived (rented) was a stove with touch buttons on the stove top, which was itself a glass surface. Never mind that it beeped annoyingly on every input. Operating it with wet hands was impossible. A common situation in a kitchen. But the worst was that, if anything boiled over, the touch buttons went bananas, and usually ended up shutting everything off. Adding further annoyance and inconvenience to the situation. Because I had limited countertop space, I often wanted to use the stove as a working surface (when not in use, obviously), but it had some godforsaken detector that registered when something was put on top of (or near) the buttons (capacitive or not), and it would continuously beep until you moved it. I mean I kind of get it as a safety feature, but on the other hand I also want to override the machine, tell it to fuck off because I'm in control of the situation, and we wouldn't even have this problem in the first place, if it wasn't for this touch garbage.

                                                                  Whoever designed that thing should be fed feet first into a wood chipper.

                                                                  • dbtc 2 weeks ago
                                                                    Try using a fruit?
                                                                    • Aachen 2 weeks ago
                                                                      Lol! I'm picturing labelling an emergency banana as such

                                                                      We don't normally have fruit laying around but maybe I can find something conductive and finger sized and keep that around. Good idea!

                                                                      It'll be a small challenge though: the stove checks that you decisively press it with an object of the right size: changing size or position, like when pressing down slowly or shifting accidentally, doesn't work; and random metal objects, spilled liquids, or light touches can't change your settings either. It also needs to stay put for a second before anything happens (not annoying at all) or 3 seconds for the on/off button. I gotta give it some credit here for the efforts they took to make this a usable and safe product. It just can't work when there's any liquid anywhere near the button you're wanting, including the off button, you have to dry it first

                                                                • analog31 2 weeks ago
                                                                  My breathing is probably influenced by what song is going through my head at any given moment.
                                                                  • canadiantim 2 weeks ago
                                                                    This is brilliant. Could definitely use this for a very low-cost diagnostic tool. It's like reading someone's pulse, but through their breath.
                                                                    • amelius 2 weeks ago
                                                                      Unfortunately this can't be measured on a smartwatch.
                                                                      • simulator5g 2 weeks ago
                                                                        You could very easily hook this up to a smartwatch. The device attached to the nasal cannula could be a simple BLE module + 2 air flow sensors. You don't even need a nasal cannula, thats just for increased accuracy for the study. The results of the study suggest that you can just observe someone's chest rise pattern to get similar results, though maybe with less accuracy.
                                                                        • amelius 2 weeks ago
                                                                          I get that you can collect data on a smartwatch, but having a separate device is not as convenient. Perhaps a system linked to a desktop with an (IR?) camera would be more convenient for working in the office. Or even a smartphone placed on a desk/stand.
                                                                        • genewitch 2 weeks ago
                                                                          Amazfit claim to monitor sleep breathing, and seem fairly accurate based on my observations (n=2)
                                                                          • amelius 2 weeks ago
                                                                            Ok, but I want to measure during work.
                                                                      • go_prodev 2 weeks ago
                                                                        Hold my CPAP

                                                                        Here's a fun fact, the CPAP machine lowers my Heart Rate Variability. HRV spikes when I sleep part of the night without it.

                                                                        • glitchc 2 weeks ago
                                                                          Not a mystery. This is directly correlated to the CPAP's primary goal which is to ensure a steady flow of air in and out of your lungs. Without the CPAP, your heart is reacting to variations in O2 (inflow) and CO2 (outflow), speeding up and slowing down accordingly, including experiencing stress during periods where the airway is completely obstructed.
                                                                          • fudged71 2 weeks ago
                                                                            I think that's backwards, higher HRV is better?
                                                                            • go_prodev 2 weeks ago
                                                                              Yes, higher is better. The CPAP lowers HRV during use.
                                                                          • NoPicklez 2 weeks ago
                                                                            Next up, sensors can now detect and know exactly who farted.
                                                                            • tinyhouse 2 weeks ago
                                                                              Can anyone share a link that doesn't require login?
                                                                              • 11235813213455 2 weeks ago
                                                                                Mine is silent, I find it gross when you can hear someone's breath, and hopefully sane (I hate cigarette smokers breathe, it still smells like death)
                                                                                • daveguy 2 weeks ago
                                                                                  > Mine is silent, I find it gross when you can hear someone's breath...

                                                                                  Hate to break it to you, but you're in for an upsetting aging process.

                                                                                  Also, your breath already isn't silent. Your brain attenuates the expected sounds, and our ears aren't nearly as sensitive as some microphones, especially microphone arrays.

                                                                                  • 2 weeks ago
                                                                                  • encom 2 weeks ago
                                                                                    You are now breathing manually.
                                                                                    • cnity 2 weeks ago
                                                                                      I like to take these types of comments as an invitation to be present for a moment. Thank you!
                                                                                      • smcin 2 weeks ago
                                                                                        but we were promised Full Self-Breathing by now!
                                                                                        • gbnwl 2 weeks ago
                                                                                          We have it! It’s just Full Self Breathing (Supervised)
                                                                                        • dbtc 2 weeks ago
                                                                                          Breath out and then try to relax and just observe; see if you can notice right when the impulse to inhale kicks in (and then let it do its thing). Repeat.

                                                                                          See if you can notice where in your body feel that impulse.

                                                                                          This is meditation.

                                                                                          • yvely 2 weeks ago
                                                                                            I just lost the game
                                                                                            • silon42 2 weeks ago
                                                                                              Time to breathe without rhythm.
                                                                                            • tumsfestival 2 weeks ago
                                                                                              You ahole!
                                                                                            • Noelia- 2 weeks ago
                                                                                              I never realized that the way we breathe could be as unique as a fingerprint and even used to identify us. I used to think of deep breathing as just a way to calm myself down, but now it seems like it reflects more than just emotions. It is part of who we are.

                                                                                              If breathing can really be used to detect health or mental states in the future, that sounds promising. But it also makes me a bit uneasy. If even our breath can be tracked, is that one more doorway to being monitored?