Home▸Medical Technology & Imaging Physics▸Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia: How Breathing Paces the Heart

🫁 Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia: How Breathing Paces the Heart

Explore respiratory sinus arrhythmia, the normal and healthy rise and fall of heart rate with each breath, driven by the vagus nerve's moment-to-moment braking of the heart's natural pacemaker.

Medical Technology & Imaging Physics3DModerate60 FPS

The simulation shows a real-time breathing waveform paired with a beat-by-beat heart rate trace, illustrating how heart rate climbs during inhalation and falls during exhalation, and how slowing the breathing rate reshapes the size of that oscillation.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Drag the breathing rate slider between roughly 6 and 20 breaths per minute, or select the resonance frequency preset near 6 breaths per minute, and press play to watch the heart rate trace ripple in sync with each simulated inhale and exhale.

💡 Did You Know?

In a resting adult, heart rate variation across a single breath can commonly reach 5 to 15 beats per minute, but slow-paced breathing near an individual's resonance frequency, often close to 6 breaths per minute, can amplify that swing several times over by synchronizing with the roughly 10-second delay of the baroreflex loop.

⚙ Under the hood

Explore respiratory sinus arrhythmia, the normal and healthy rise and fall of heart rate with each breath, driven by the vagus nerve's moment-to-moment braking of the heart's natural pacemaker.

respiratory sinus arrhythmiavagal tonebreathingheart rateautonomic nervous systemphysiologybiofeedback

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install