How you breathe could reveal a lot about your health

Monitoring people's breathing could help diagnose, or even treat, various conditions 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. 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.