Indigo – A Biofeedback Device & Technology

What is Biofeedback?

Biofeedback is a treatment technique in which people are trained to improve their health by using signals from their own bodies. Physical therapists use biofeedback to help stroke victims regain movement in paralyzed muscles. Psychologists use it to help tense and anxious clients learn to relax. Specialists in many different fields use biofeedback to help their patients cope with pain.

Chances are you have used biofeedback yourself. You’ve used it if you have ever taken your temperature or stepped on a scale. The thermometer tells you whether you’re running a fever, the scale whether you’ve gained weight. Both devices “feed back” information about your body’s condition. Armed with this information, you can take steps you’ve learned to improve the condition.

Biofeedback instruments measure the following body’s systems and activities:

Muscle activity
Skin temperature
Electro-dermal activity (sweat gland activity)
Respiration
Heart rate, heart rate variability
Blood pressure
Brain electrical activity and blood flow

Clinicians reply on complicated biofeedback technologies (GSR, EEG, CAT scan, MRI, etc) in somewhat the same way that you rely on your scale or thermometer. These technologies are able to capture the bodies’ analog electrical signals and translate those signals into meaningful information through complex algorithmic software that a technician can then decipher.

It can measure factors of the body electric such as the voltage of the firing brain cells, the amperage of the heart muscle contractions, the voltage of the muscles and the resistance to the flow of electricity of the skin. It can detect a person’s internal bodily functions with far greater sensitivity and precision than a person can alone. In general, any biofeedback device quite simply is any technique which takes a measurement of the body, and provides a result.

The information measured with a biofeedback device is then “fed-back” to the client, informing them of various physiological parameters and stress responses within the body, and educating them about the need to retrain their body’s stress responses, balance the body electric, make lifestyle changes or learn to control physiological reactions, in order to achieve improved relaxation and better health overall.