A new study has revealed that each person’s breathing pattern is so distinct that it could serve as a kind of “nasal fingerprint” and is capable of identifying individuals with nearly 97% accuracy.
The study by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science was published in Current Biology and involved tracking the nasal airflow of nearly 100 healthy participants for 24 hours using a custom-made wearable device. The device, fitted with soft tubes placed under the nose, recorded participants’ breathing as they carried out their daily routines.
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“We found that we could identify members of a 97-participant cohort at a remarkable 96.8% accuracy from nasal airflow patterns alone,” the researchers wrote. “In other words, humans have individual nasal airflow fingerprints.”
The breathing patterns also were found to correlate with body mass index (BMI), sleep-wake cycles, and even levels of anxiety and depression.
“What’s fascinating is that something as simple as breath may reflect complex traits like emotional health,” said Dr Noam Sobel, the study’s senior author. “We consider this a brain readout; it’s like reading the mind through the nose.”
Participants who scored higher on anxiety scales, for instance, showed shorter inhales and more variability between breaths while sleeping. Though none of the volunteers had diagnosed mental health conditions, the findings suggest that continuous monitoring of breath could become a powerful, non-invasive tool to assess emotional well-being.
Dr Sobel and his team now speculate whether changes in breathing might not just reflect mental states but influence them too. “Perhaps the way you breathe makes you anxious or depressed,” he said. “If that’s true, altering breathing patterns could be a new frontier in mental health treatment.”
The researchers suggest that these personalised respiratory signatures could pave the way for non-invasive mental and physical health monitoring in the future, possibly through wearable technology.
