Parasympathetic. Hard to say, easy to measure.

As this brief interview with Financial Freedom Today at the Future Innovation Summit in Dubai clearly shows, “parasympathetic” can be a bit of a mouthful when you’re thrust in front of a camera. So why even mention it? Is it something we need to measure at all? And what tortuous process would you have to go through to gather the data?

Parasympathetic and sympathetic activity together make up the autonomic nervous system, which is essentially a measure of your human operating system. After every breath, body movement and heartbeat your brain scans the internal and external environment and predicts the changes in the energy you need. Your brain then sends a signal, via the vagus nerve, that slows or speeds up your heart rate and other body functions to meet any physical needs. In other words, you are constantly and subconsciously adapting to the immediate demands around you, heartbeat by heartbeat.

By measuring this subconscious activity we gain an immediate, real-time and objective measure of health and wellbeing, stress and recovery. Over time, and with the application of AI, we will be able to step-change our ability to identify and monitor chronic health conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. And, with the ability to accurately identify sleep stages including deep sleep, we can help delay the onset of diseases such as Alzheimers. ProBiometrics is already conducting research in all these areas.

So how difficult is it to obtain this valuable data? As it happens, it’s easier than any of the health monitoring devices and wearables you may already be using. ProBiometrics has the ability and global rights to calculate a clinically validated measure of parasympathetic nervous system activity known as Cardiac Vagal Tone (CVT), derived from a high resolution ECG, in both commercial and clinical environments. And our contactless ECG capture device is a small piece of material that sits on your mattress and under the bedsheet, which gathers the data even through your bedclothes. It then automatically uploads the data to our cloud based servers. Fit it, forget it, and have both a real-time and an historical record of your health and wellbeing - for you or for you health professional.

Simple.