Somatic
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How it works

The measurement loop, end to end.

Five minutes a day. One scan, one practice, one delta. Every couple of weeks, a validated stress score tells you whether any of it is actually adding up.

Step 1 — The 90-second morning scan

Same posture, same time of day, every morning.

You sit still, hold your finger over your phone's rear camera, and the app reads your pulse from the tiny color changes in your fingertip. After ninety seconds it has enough clean signal to compute RMSSD — the time-domain HRV metric that agrees most closely with ECG at rest.

You don't get a thumbs up or a verdict. You see today's number against your personal rolling baseline — the 7-, 14-, and 30-day range your body actually lives in. The reading might say:

"RMSSD 38 ms — inside your normal range (32–46). Readiness: moderate."

That's the whole output. A reading, a range, a band. No state map. No score we invented.

Why standardized

HRV moves with sleep, caffeine, breathing rate, posture, and time of day. The only way the morning number means anything is if the conditions around it stay consistent. Same chair, same time, same posture — that's why the trend becomes interpretable.

Step 2 — Adaptive matching

One practice, picked for where you actually are today.

Once today's reading is in, the matcher looks at:

  • The goal you set in onboarding (calmer evenings / less reactivity / better sleep / focus)
  • Where today's RMSSD sits in your baseline range (low / moderate / high readiness)
  • The time of day
  • Your last evening check-in and any recent self-report

Then it recommends one 3–5 minute practice from an evidence-anchored library:

  • Slow-paced breathing at your resonance frequency (~6 breaths/min)
  • HRV biofeedback with a live trace
  • Physiological sigh or extended-exhale patterns
  • 5-4-3-2-1 sensory grounding
  • Gentle somatic movement, shaking, or body tapping
  • Humming or other "vagus-adjacent" exercises (offered, but not branded as clinical vagus nerve stimulation — we don't make claims the science doesn't support)

One protocol per session. No catalog to doom-scroll.

How matching works today

In v1, matching is rule-based — a transparent set of heuristics tied to goal, readiness band, time of day, and recent check-in. It's deliberately simple so you can predict what you'll get.

How matching gets smarter

In v2 the matcher becomes a contextual bandit — it learns which protocols actually move your numbers and your check-ins, and biases toward them while keeping an exploration floor so you discover new ones. Same loop, more personalized over time. We're collecting the data for it from session one.

Step 3 — 20 seconds before, 20 seconds after

Did this practice move your body?

Before the practice starts: a quick 20-second scan. After it ends: another 20-second scan. The app shows you the delta in plain numbers.

"RMSSD up 12% after extended-exhale breathing. Your nervous system responded to this one."

Or, on a different day:

"RMSSD essentially unchanged. This one didn't land — try a different protocol tonight."

That's the per-session proof. Some practices will work for your body. Some won't. You stop guessing within the first week.

Why pre/post matters

Almost everything in the category asks you to trust that the session "did something." We'd rather show you. Your delta is your own. Over weeks, your personal top-3 protocols emerge from the data — not from a marketing claim.

Step 4 — The weekly outcome report

The validated questionnaires clinicians use, re-administered on a schedule.

Every 7–14 days, Somatic asks you to complete two short instruments:

  • PSS-10 (Perceived Stress Scale) — 10 items, the standard self-report measure of perceived stress over the past month
  • GAD-7 (Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item) — 7 items, widely used in research and primary care

Your score line plots over time. Up, down, flat. Alongside it: your personal top-3 protocols by measured effect — drawn from the pre/post deltas you've actually generated.

This is the proof layer. Not "did the session feel nice." Is the validated score that researchers use actually moving for you, week over week.

The quality gate

We'd rather reject a scan than lie to you.

Camera PPG is good — at rest, with a still finger, and clean light. Move your hand, lift your finger, take a phone call mid-scan, and the signal gets noisy.

Most apps would silently smooth that noise into a confident-looking number. We don't. Every scan runs a quality gate. If the signal-to-noise is too low, the motion artifact is too high, or the clean window is too short, we throw the reading out and ask you to redo it.

"Let's redo that — we couldn't get a clean enough read."

It's mildly annoying. It's also why the trend means something. Bad data smoothed into a smooth line is worse than no data — it makes you confident about the wrong thing. We'd rather one rejected scan than thirty smooth, misleading ones.

What you get back

The arc of the first month.

After your first week

  • A personal baseline range for your morning RMSSD
  • Three to five pre/post deltas in your own data
  • A first PSS-10 and GAD-7 score to anchor the trend line

After your first month

  • A real trend in your morning readings against your own baseline
  • Your personal top-3 protocols by measured effect on your body
  • A second PSS-10/GAD-7 reading — your first real "is this actually moving" answer

Common questions

About the loop.

No. Somatic does not sell or require any hardware. It runs on your existing iPhone and uses the phone camera to measure heart rate variability. It is not a chest strap, finger clip, ring, watch, or vibrating device.
Somatic includes HRV biofeedback (HRV-B) as one of its Tier 1 protocols — a real-time breathing pacer with a live HRV trace — but the broader product is a measurement-and-practice loop, not a pure biofeedback device. Every session captures pre/post HRV deltas, and validated PSS-10 and GAD-7 questionnaires are re-administered every 7–14 days to track outcomes.
The quality gate is an automatic check on every camera scan that rejects readings with motion artifact, poor signal quality, or an inadequate measurement window. When a scan fails the gate, Somatic asks you to redo it rather than silently producing a misleading number. "Let's redo that" is a feature, not a bug.
Your baseline range is your personal rolling 7-, 14-, and 30-day HRV range — what is normal for your body, not for a population. Somatic uses this range to classify each morning reading as low, moderate, or high readiness relative to you. This is why we never deliver verdicts from a single number.
Before each short protocol, Somatic captures a roughly 20-second HRV scan; after the protocol, it captures another. The change between the two — the pre/post delta — shows the actual effect of that practice on your physiology in that session. This is the core feedback loop and the reason Somatic exists: you stop guessing whether the practice "worked."
Somatic uses a rule-based adaptive engine that considers your stated goal (for example, calmer evenings, better sleep, less reactivity), time of day, your current readiness band relative to your baseline, and recent self-report data. It recommends one evidence-anchored protocol from a tight library tagged by evidence tier. Future versions will use a contextual bandit trained on per-protocol outcome data.
Somatic answers this directly: a roughly 20-second HRV scan before the practice, a 3–5 minute protocol, and another 20-second scan after, so you see the change in your own physiology that session. Over weeks, validated PSS-10 and GAD-7 questionnaires re-administered every 7–14 days show whether your stress and anxiety scores are moving. This is the measurement loop the rest of the category is missing.
A single low reading is not a verdict — HRV is noisy and varies day to day. Somatic interprets each reading relative to your personal rolling baseline and, if today sits low in your range, suggests a matched short protocol such as slow-paced breathing near 6 breaths per minute, then measures the post-practice change. Over time you learn which practices reliably move your numbers up — the actionable layer wearables don't provide.
No. Somatic uses your iPhone camera to measure HRV directly, so no wearable is required. In a future release Somatic will optionally read HRV from Apple HealthKit for users who already have a wearable, but it has never required one.

Start the loop.

Three baseline scans. A short PSS-10 and GAD-7. Your first matched practice.

Five minutes to set up. Free to start.

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