Breathing exercises are a wonderful way to reduce anxiety, agitation and stress, while promoting relaxation, calm and inner peace. It may take some practice – and requires some commitment on your part to achieve results. However, the long-term benefits are well worth the effort – a calm and relaxed body and mind are less prone to health issues.
— Dr. Andrew Weil, on The Art and Science of Breathing

Dr. Weil often recommends the 4-7-8 breath for relaxation and stress reduction, a safe and easily implemented technique. In fact, it’s one of the most effective recommendations I make in my medical practice. But it only scratches the surface of breathing’s potential.

While I’ve been recommending specific breathing techniques for many years, I have found that similar to exercise and dietary recommendations, people frequently get hung up on one or more obstacles and don’t implement a regular practice of breathing in their lives.

Thus when earlier this year I met a small team of engineers at Prana Tech here in San Francisco with interests in yoga and meditation, who were developing a wearable device and app to track and train breathing, it really caught my attention. I’ve been testing and using wearable devices for years, but was particularly attracted to the possibility of empowering my patients (and myself) to practice breathing techniques during our busy days.

Obstacles to implementing breathing practice

1. I can’t find time to practice every day, or I simply forget to practice.

Taking the time to practice breathing can be hard amidst a hectic schedule of home life, work life, and the constant distractions of modern life. The beauty of breathing techniques is that they have benefit even when practiced only 2-3 minutes a day. Over time, one can build up to longer practice, but many people find that short exercises when practiced regularly can have significant benefit.

The Prana wearable breathing and posture tracker.

Prana’s wearable device allows you to practice breathing in short increments, typically 30 seconds to 2 minutes, and reminds you gently to take a brief break from your activities to focus on posture and your breathing practice when you need it most. Prana’s passive tracking mode identifies when the user is breathing more shallowly and from the chest, as happens when stressed or anxious, and discreetly vibrates to alert that it’s time to take a break and practice a breathing technique. This can easily be done at work seated in a chair, even discreetly during meetings. All is takes is a minute or two.

2. It’s hard to know if I’m doing the breathing techniques correctly. The initial results can be so subtle.

A teacher is indeed useful, both to learn the techniques correctly, and to get feedback and encouragement during the early days when the results can be subtle. This way, through regular practice, proper technique, and encouragement, one can experience the more dramatic benefits that manifest over time.

In my medical practice, I have often recommended that patients find an Iyengar Yoga teacher skilled in teaching pranayama (the Indian science of breathing).  However, it can be hard to find a properly-trained teacher in many parts of the world, and the inconvenience and cost of attending classes can be a barrier to entry.

So if a simple wearable device and app like Prana can deliver many of the benefits of a good yoga teacher, anywhere and any time, it could benefit many.

3. I’ve been trying to learn breathing techniques on my own, and I’m not seeing results.

Posture is an often overlooked element, as it is essential to proper breathing. Sitting up straight decompresses the abdomen, frees up the diaphragm and allows a full range of breathing. Like a good yoga teacher, Prana’s device automatically tracks and coaches on proper posture, as well as breathing technique, so that the user gets the maximum benefit of each.

4. How do I know which techniques to use for my particular goals?

One can read books, Light on Yoga being a definitive, yet fairly dense, reference. But Prana features 30 of the most common breathing patterns recommended by experts. It includes descriptions of their effects and uses, and also videos demonstrating correct technique. Then the wearable device and app give feedback on performance in real time.  It’s both motivating and reassuring.

5. I need a personal touch to motivate me.

After rolling out the initial product, it’s on Prana’s timeline to offer coaching from a breath training expert, who can look at the data, watch breathing via a video call, and provide individualized guidance and motivation.  All without leaving home or office. There’s also game mode where proper technique earns points and rewards, offering a way to get feedback in a fun way.

Conclusion

The sooner you start practicing proper breathing techniques every day, the sooner you will start to feel the benefits. I often recommend people start with Dr. Weil’s 4-7-8 breath, since it’s safe and everyone can use a bit of relaxation.

I’m excited that Prana’s wearable device will make it easier for more people to learn and actually implement breathing as a tool for health and wellness. Excited enough to get me involved in the project. The project is now on Kickstarter, aiming to take it from a working prototype to a production unit.

Prana’s app in game mode.

I started by beta testing the Prana prototypes with my patients, and was impressed with the novel technology, which for the first time allows accurate tracking of breath while taking posture into account in a very light and trim package that clips on at the waistline. The app has modes for advanced biofeedback, but also has fun games where the control is your own breathing – appealing to a wider audience including children. The implications for health and wellness are profound, and I sincerely hope this project comes to fruition so that others can benefit.

Check out the Kickstarter page here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/771156004/prana-wearable-for-breathing-and-posture/.

(pre-order discounts still available as of April 14, 2015)

Paul Abramson MD

Take, for example, Dr. Paul Abramson, a primary care doctor in San Francisco’s financial district.

Abramson is no techno-phobe. He sees patients in a sleek white office with a hydraulic standing desk from Denmark and listens to their hearts with a digital stethoscope.

“I like gadgets,” Abramson explains.

Abramson sees many patients from the tech industry. More and more, he says, people are coming in with data collected from consumer medical devices. One recent patient took this to an extreme.

Listen to the show here:

or read a transcript here:

Do Wearables and Health Apps Belong in the Doctor’s Office?

Whitney Boesel is a sociology PhD student who writes for Cyborgology, and studies mood tracking and the sociology of new technology. During our hour-long session, Whitney tweeted 29 times. She was able to boil down some of Dr. Abramson’s core values and aspects of our Quant Coaching Program to a series of 140 character messages.

For the entire stream of live tweets, click here.
 

Most importantly, Dr. Abramson emphasized that self tracking in a medical context has “..made me focus on the fact that medical care is more of a process ..  It’s more than just a result.” Far beyond simply using the “medical gadget of the day,” his practice offers a highly-supported environment for patients to gain self knowledge while conducting safe and effective physician-supervised personal health experiments.

An excerpt from the article:

When Dr. Paul Abramson treats patients, he has the usual assortment of medical tools, tests and protocols. And then there’s the patient-gathered data he reserves for his most confounding cases.

Using an iPhone app, Abramson will have a patient with, say, mystifying migraines or seemingly inexplicable stomachaches self-track data such as how much sleep they’re getting or what they’re eating.

That information is eventually fed back to Abramson as potential clues to whatever medical mystery he’s trying to solve. The result is a more complete picture of his patients that in turn makes it much easier for him to figure out what’s going on. […]

Click here for the entire article at SFGate.com

For more information about medically supervised self tracking and the Quant Coach program at My Doctor Medical Group: Click Here.

Migraines can be a debilitating, painful and time-consuming medical condition. Sufferers of severe migraines typically must isolate themselves from light, sounds and other stimuli for hours or sometimes even days. The cost in terms of pain and suffering, and lost productivity, can be considerable. Many “migraineurs” pursue the hope of figuring out a trigger that can be avoided, thereby reducing migraine frequency or severity.

Creative Commons Licensed (CC BY 2.0): Link to Original

A new study from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center confirms that while migraine sufferers often think they know their triggers, it is actually almost impossible to know without a formalized experiment. This is due to …

View the entire post on the My Doctor Medical Group Blog.

1. Get baseline data before making any changes; and
2. Make one change at a time so you can conduct controlled experiments.

Most of all, if you have medical problems or a complex situation, find a doctor who can help supervise and guide your self-tracking project. This can produce better results and avoid some of the more common pitfalls of doing self-experimentation unaided.

Our medically-supervised Quant Coaching program is here: http://mydoctorsf.com/quant-coach-program.html

The Wall Street Journal Article is here: Know Thy Quantified Self.

Direct Link to slides on SlideShare

Link to Medicine of Cycling.

City Visions explores the growing “quantified self” movement in the Bay Area. Proponents say that gathering, analyzing — and sharing– data about our everyday activities can help us sleep better, lose weight, avoid disease, stay happier and live longer. What kinds of self-tracking technologies are out there, and is there ever such a thing as too much self-knowledge?

Listen to the audio program here: NPR Page for KALW Radio Show Audio

Guests:

Paul Abramson MD, Medical Director of My Doctor Medical Group, a private practice he founded in San Francisco, and member of the clinical faculty at UCSF. A former electrical engineer and programmer, Paul has been self-tracking for a number of years.

Ashley Tudor, a design strategist who focuses on innovation and health. She is also the author of Sweet Potato Power, a guide to nutrition and self-monitoring to optimize health. In 2010, Mayor Gavin Newsom named Ashley one of San Francisco’s top innovators in health.

Jim Kean, CEO and founder of WellnessFX, a San Francisco-based company that provides biometrics tests, consultations and a web-based platform for consumers to organize and track their health-related data. Jim is a veteran of online health, having founded Sapient Health Network, which became the foundation of WebMD’s consumer health business. He is also an avid CrossFittter and competes at the masters level.

Listen to the audio program here: NPR Page for KALW Radio Show Audio

“Many of the people who come to my office…have come because modern medicine has failed them in some way, or they have used up its power to help them and they know not what else to do.” —Rachel Naomi Remen, MD

A couple of weeks ago, at Stanford Medicine X, Paul Abramson MD used that quotation to kick off a presentation on how the Quantified Self movement is intersecting with medicine. Abramson, originally an electrical engineer by training, discovered he was more motivated by listening to people’s stories and trying to help them than doing research in engineering. He then enrolled in medical school, and eventually began practicing family medicine. Later on, he began to dabble in self tracking to find out why he had been experiencing recurrent headaches. He later used data garnered from the experiments to link the headaches to a sleep problem and had an epiphany: “Why can’t we do [something similar] for a lot of people?”

Among the biggest problems in medicine, as Abramson sees it, is a lack of patient empowerment and poor customer service. The Quantified Self movement can be harnessed to help address such problems, he explained. In many ways, what health trackers are doing is an extension of a long medical tradition. “Doctors have been prescribing headache logs for people with migraines and dietary logs [for a long time.]” While the Quantified self movement gives adherents new power to monitor their health, most people, however, have limited success with self tracking unless they are highly motivated, he acknowledged. To deal with that issue, Abramson has come up with a paradigm in his medical practice to put the patient in touch with a data-tracking coach as well as the doctor. “It is a team based approach but it is really based on this self-exploratory model.” The quant coach works with a patient as a peer to help motivate them and interpret their health data.

You may find the original article here: http://www.qmed.com/mpmn/medtechpulse/why-quantified-self-movement-will-continue-make-inroads-medicine

Paul Abramson MD, a UCSF clinical instructor who described himself as a longtime self-tracker, started off in engineering but switched to medicine because he was more drawn toward hearing people’s individual stories than toward doing research in a conventional way, he said.

Paul Abramson, MD, spoke at a session on spreading opportunities for self-tracking.

Self-tracking may not be for everyone, Abramson said, but it may be especially helpful for those who are diagnosed with medical problems for which conventional treatment typically offers little benefit; for those with symptoms and syndromes that are not adequately diagnosed through conventional medicine; for those who want to change their behavior; for those who want to identify environmental, dietary, contextual or social contributors to their symptoms; or for those who simply want to be more involved in their own health care.

“There is a real lack of interactivity and [patient] empowerment in the standard model,” of medical practice, Abramson said.

In his private practice, Abramson has brought in co-workers he calls “quant coaches,” expert peers who can help patients identify and achieve self-tracking goals and who can work together with the physician and patient to help solve medical problems, such as irritable bowel, chronic fatigue, depression, psoriasis, addictions, diabetes, anxiety and headaches and non-cardiac chest pain.

Abramson said that to him the process of engaging with and helping patients to solve problems and make decisions is more important than the data collected.

Find the complete article here: http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2012/10/12913/self-tracking-may-become-key-element-personalized-medicine