About the App VaYou

Home About the App VaYou

The new iOS-app VaYou is a wonderful tool for getting in beneficial contact with yourself. It’s easy! By breathing with VaYou’s sounds – generated directly by you – and with realtime biofeedback, breath, mind and heart increasingly flow as one.

Key VaYou Pros

Biometric Integration – VaYou has a sophisticated realtime breath- and pulse-detection, without the need of extra wearables or expensive medical sensors.
We really went to the technical limits. VaYou transforms the iOS movement/accelerometer data-stream into high-quality biosignals for breath and pulse (lying position).
To promote freeing your mind and relax, the VaYou-algorithms learn from your biosignals and derived parameters how to modulate sounds in a way that works for You at this very moment. Adapting ever fresh – ever new.

No other app or desktop-software does live biofeedback like VaYou.

Airplane Mode

In VaYou’s LIVE-mode you put the iPhone on the belly. You do not have to, but it is wise to switch to Airplane mode beforehand : You are free of radiowaves near your body! With Airplane mode ON, flowing with Vayou is a 100% healthy and safe.

VaYou LIVE versus PACER mode

The LIVE biofeedback mode transforms your breath-flow (registered from the belly) into specially crafted sounds. Your breath-flow generates sounds which have an effect on your state of mind and subsequently on your whole organism. As an example, your heart rhythm gets positively modulated by flowing with VaYou.

In LIVE-mode you are in control of VaYou with your body. For this the iPhone acts as a sensor on your belly.

VaYou PACER mode

The PACER mode is fine when you want to get into a breath-flow with a selected breath rate (Settings). You will use paced breathing when you want to have a guided breath-flow. Using the PACER is also fine when you are on the move, in a train or a moving airplane. In PACER mode you do not have to put the iPhone on your belly.

In PACER-mode you can take advantage of VaYou as guide for your breath-flow.

You will be guided by VaYou in three ways:

symbols that change in size
smoothly changing color-flows
special sounds that intuitively tell you when and how to breathe in and out.

For instance many people have a healthy and prominent heart rate variability (HRV) at about 6.0 breaths per minute. (For kids this value is slightly higher.)

VaYou LIVE mode

We encourage you to use the LIVE mode, sitting or lying, whenever possible. The big difference to PACER mode is that in LIVE mode you create your own breath~flow~rhythm, the one that fits You right at this moment. You can let yourself completely. Vayou’s novelty is this unique flow~experience.

With continued use you get more easily into your flow with enduring positive effects. Breath, sound and mind not just feel as one, they become one.

It’s easy. All you have to do is find a quiet place to lie down on your back or sit upright or reclined, put on your headphones and select one of the VaYou-Flows. Place your iPhone or iPod touch on your belly and slide it halfway inside the belt line of your pants and continue breathing naturally. You will hear your live-breathing from the belly, analyzed and transformed into a combination of specially programmed sounds, which are “played” and modulated by your breath~flow. By and by you will flow into a slightly slowed and regular breath-rhythm that feels one with the sounds.

What happens beyond ?

When lying down in a dark room, your breath-flow is also displayed as a smooth color-light transition you can see projected on the ceiling. Moreover you can connect your iPhone to an AppleTV, supplying you with an even more intense optical feedback via flatscreen, where the changing colors mirror your breath-flow in realtime.

Your breathing becomes more evenly balanced and eventually slows. Commonly said, the mind-active sounds modulate your mental and somatic state in the direction of homeostasis. These subtle modulations within yourself can be an effective aid for a variety of personal difficulties, actual challenges, or personal “projects”.

Your personal VaYou

Do you have an “issue” right now? You can do something about it: choose one or two Vayou~Flows that suit your personal taste and invest 10 minutes twice a day (or more) for undistracted VaYou time. You will experience how your mental state changes over time.

Here some examples where VaYou can be helpful.

VaYou works

by applying the following principles and methods, directly or indirectly:

regarding a systemic perspective: self-organization, self-regulation, autopoiesis, enactivism, attractor, perception, feedback, feedforward, resonance;
regarding a somatic perspective: homeostasis, pulse-respiration relation, breath-pulse-coherence, resonance frequency, parasympathetic activity, vagal tone, sympathetic activity, heart-rate variability (HRV), respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA);
regarding a psychic / psychologic perspective: flow-experience, respiration-mind relation, breath-emotion dynamics, psychosomatics, somatopsychic, awareness, breath-focussed meditation, altered states of consciousness, hypnagogic state, psychoacoustics, body-mind, mind-body;
regarding a therapeutic perspective: salutogenesis, focussing, sound therapy, passive music therapy, analog biofeedback, respiratory feedback, HRV-biofeedback, coherence feedback, pacing and leading, self-healing, yoga-nidra, nada-yoga, pranayama;
regarding a scientific–technical perspective: realtime processing, biosignal analysis, cybernetics, resonance-, feedback- and feedforward-processes, recursion, enactive interfaces, sonification, accelerometer, Apple Health, machine learning;
regarding a psycho-social perspective: liminality, quantified self, analog digital health, analog digital medicine, self-help;

Please note …

… this is just the beginning of a long-lasting VaYou~process, not just with and in yourself. Numerous features are filling our tables and we are curious to get to know your wishes in order to prioritize accordingly. Feel free to get in contact with us and the VaYou-community.

Join the VaYou tribe here on Facebook!

Compatibility infos

The current VaYou-version is compatible with the following Apple devices: iPhone 5+, iPod touch 6G+ running iOS 10+.