HeartMath Inner Balance 30-Pin

I've had extensive education in biofeedback as part of my professional training, and I read about heart-rate coherence and its therapeutic applications awhile ago. A personal friend with an anxiety disorder is recently facing a major health issue, and it soon became clear to me that his anxiety was as much a threat to him as his physical health problem. Medications weren't working very well so, remembering my biofeedback training, I did some reading and suggested he try Heartmath's Inner Balance -- that it was worth a try(especially given Amazon's liberal return policies). After encountering some problems getting the sensor to work with the iPhone 5, he started using the device... and the results were amazing. Moments after completing his first session, a session begun at the onset of a mild panic, he told me "I had forgotten that it's possible to actually feel GOOD". Since then, he has used Inner Balance several times a day, and sometimes at night when he can't sleep. Sometimes it helps a lot, sometimes it helps a little, but he finds that it ALWAYS helps. While I certainly recognize that this won't be the case for everyone, I can on the basis of my friend's experience highly endorse this. I have used it myself and definitely feel the effects. The technology is very simple and, whereas it's frankly a bit shocking to me that a simple inexpensive sensor of this kind is being packaged and marketed and sold for $100 (this seems wildly expensive to me), it's been worth every penny to my friend, and I can personally attest to how much it seems to be helping. Whether his ability to access states of "inner balance" on his own has improved or not is unknown to me; what I can see is that, after doing a session, he always feels better, and often feels better for the rest of the day. Some days, he uses it several times a day; other days, not at all. It's definitely worth a try. If you're anxious, consider it.

I own and have played with a bunch of biofeedback and neurofeedback devices and was totally underwhelmed by the heartmath. I did some simple breathing exercises and got high coherence stayed in greed the whole time. The application does not scale difficulty based on where you are (really weird). After some playing around I found a setting that allowed me to increase the difficulty. I still do not quite understand what coherence is all about and why it is so important and more important how it is determined based on heart rate variability. I am googling it right now and there seems to be a good scientific basis for it. The feedback is really weak the green blue red dots on a circle is reasonably effective at telling you when to breath but is a very course feedback hard to tell if you are at coherence 7.0 and green or coherence 2 and green. I landed up using the last screen which shows the coherence graph over time. This was definitely more effective for me in terms of a feedback process but it has been shown in neuro and bio feedback studies time and again that the graph output of a variable is generally not great for training since our brains do not become engaged by this feedback. I am still a little confused as to what they are hoping to achieve with this device. Having said this all I love biofeedback devices and love a decent biofeedback device on your phone. I love the convenience of a simple ear reader and the size convenience compared to GSR (Galvanic skin response) etc devices, Great for carrying with you wherever you go. In summary I think this is great technology. I just think this is a poorly implemented application. Hopefully with time more and better applications will become available.

Loved the product... when it worked. I purchased this device twice and both devices were tempremental. They worked well for a one week and 30% of the time thereafter which was incredibly frustrating AND ironic considering this device is supposed to teach you how to calm yourself. In fairness, I used a special adapter to plug it my iPhone 5 because this version is designed for the iPhone 4. The adapter might have something to do with the shoddy performance but that's still not excuseable. The adapter I mentioned works perfectly well with other non-Apple products and if this device is not compatible with an Apple iPhone adapter it should say so in the product description. I recently bought the iPhone 5 version and (fingers crossed) it's working just fine.

HeartMath is a good tool for reluctant meditators. It gives you a visual cue to focus on and pace your breathing. Then it keeps you motivated with regular feedback. The downside is that the instructions are very weak and very little of the app is explained. For example, there are two wavy lines running along the top of the screen which I assume indicate heart rate and breath, but I couldn't find an explanation anywhere! Also, the program uses vague language which is never defined (e.g., "you are maintaining high coherence"). I am getting good results using this program, as I would expect from regular meditation, which I was not doing previously.