How you breathe is like a fingerprint that can identify you
57 comments
·June 15, 2025meindnoch
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
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
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.
iwontberude
We need a way to get quantum entangled particles delivered to various parts of our bodies for ultimate privacy guarantees.
qwertox
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.
tbrownaw
> 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
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
This is the real reason why people like remote work.
Aachen
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...
bilekas
As someone with bathroom stage fright from time to time, this is terrifying.
SketchySeaBeast
And this is why I have absolutely no reservations about going loud in the stall.
b0a04gl
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
> 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
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.
bradley13
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
>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.
guzik
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
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
rebolek
"you need to be equipped with a nasal cannula" now. In few years, who knows. And then, spies.
IshKebab
I think it's just out of interest. There doesn't necessarily need to be a practical application.
tantalor
> 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
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.
CraigJPerry
Yeah they can have enough resolution to observe your pulse:
https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/359293305/2311....
kylehotchkiss
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
Pebble in the shoe, pebble in the nostril.
reginald78
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.
thenewwazoo
Neato. I bet this could be trained to identify/differentiate people based on mmWave sensors, which can reliably detect breathing and muscle movements.
macawfish
There are dozens if not hundreds of papers on exactly this topic :)
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.