A new study published in Current Biology reveals that each of us has a unique nasal respiratory fingerprint, an individually specific and stable pattern of breathing. This groundbreaking research shows that these “fingerprints” can be used to identify individuals with near-biometric accuracy and provide significant insights into a person’s physiology, emotional state, and even cognitive traits. For coaches and athletes, this could open a new frontier in personalized training and health monitoring.
What Is a Respiratory Fingerprint?
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science developed a wearable device called the Nasal Holter to continuously measure and log nasal airflow for 24 hours. The device, which uses a nasal cannula to measure airflow, collected data from 97 participants. The study found that a neural network classifier could identify individuals with a remarkable 96.8% accuracy based on their nasal airflow patterns alone.
The study also found that these individual breathing patterns remain stable over time, with identification accuracy at 95.24% in test-retest experiments conducted over several months, in some cases nearly two years. This stability makes the nasal respiratory fingerprint a reliable and long-term indicator, even more accurate than voice recognition.
More Than Just Airflow: The Insights Revealed
The research goes beyond simple identification, showing that these unique respiratory patterns are linked to a wide range of personal characteristics and health metrics. The study found significant correlations between an individual’s respiratory fingerprint and:
- Physiological State: Your respiratory fingerprint can indicate your Body Mass Index (BMI) and even differentiate between sleep and wakefulness.
- Cognitive and Emotional Traits: The study showed a strong link between respiratory patterns and a person’s mood, anxiety levels, and certain behavioral traits. Imagine having an objective, real-time indicator of an athlete’s mental state, helping you tailor training to prevent burnout.
The research suggests that because our brains are unique, the complex networks that drive respiration produce a unique output—a “respiratory fingerprint”. This is an indication that these breathing patterns reflect the deeper neural drivers of respiration, not just the physical act of inhaling and exhaling
What’s next?
This research validates the importance of continuous respiratory monitoring. Imagine the possibilities if people could consciously learn to replicate healthy breathing patterns to improve their mental and emotional states. Imagine having real-time data on how your respiration changes during different phases of your workout, or how it’s impacted by stress or fatigue. This isn’t just about breathing rate; it’s about understanding the complex patterns—the “fingerprint”—that your body is generating.
With this information, coaches could go beyond traditional metrics and further personalize their training plans. Athletes could track their recovery by monitoring changes in their breathing patterns during sleep or adjust their effort levels in real-time based on how their respiratory system is responding.
Breathing has become a thriving study field with enormous potential in both health and sports. This is related to the development of wearable devices such as CHASKi, a respiratory wearable system that makes it possible to measure breathing patterns in real time and across multiple contexts, opening the door to a deeper and more personalized understanding of how we breathe and how this impacts our performance and well-being. Breathing is no longer just an automatic reflex, but a key tool for diagnosis, training, and optimization, and everything points to it becoming one of the pillars of the future in healthcare and sports performance improvement.
Source
Soroka et al., (2025). Humans have nasal respiratory fingerprints. Current Biology, 35(13), 3011–3021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.05.008