Haptic Biofeedback

Haptic Biofeedback — "the strap that breathes you down"

NOOP doesn't just measure your nervous system — it can gently act on it. Your strap's haptic motor can pace your breathing with the screen off and even buzz a felt rhythm just below your heart rate so it drifts down. Then NOOP shows you the measured change. This is the one thing no locked-down strap or ring app does: theirs either don't buzz, don't expose raw beat-to-beat timing on the device, or don't compute on-device.

It comes in three layers, all off by default and opt-in:

1. Resonance breathing — find and breathe at your personal calm pace.
2. "Calm me" — a below-heart-rate buzz metronome for a stressed moment.
3. Passive stress check-ins — an optional one-minute cue when your HRV dips while you're still.

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What you need

• A WHOOP that's connected and bonded/worn (the haptic motor is what does the work). Without a bonded strap, the breathing layers fall back to a visual-only orb, and the haptic-first layers ("Calm me", auto check-ins) are disabled rather than faked.
• A few clean minutes sitting still for the resonance sweep.

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Layer 1 — Find your resonance pace, then breathe to it

Your resonance pace is the breathing rate — usually somewhere around 4.5–7 breaths per minute — at which your heart rate swings the most healthily with each breath. Everyone's is slightly different, and NOOP can find yours by pacing you through a few candidate rates and watching how your heart responds.

Find it (one time):

1. Open Breathe.
2. Switch to the Resonance mode.
3. Tap "Find your resonance pace."
4. Choose Full sweep · ~13 min (more thorough) or Quick sweep · ~7 min.
5. Sit still, breathe to the buzz, and let it run. A small label shows which pace it's testing and an "RSA response by pace" bar updates live.
6. At the end you'll see "Your locked pace · 5.5 br/min" (your number will differ) and the response curve. NOOP dates it, because your pace can drift — re-run any time to update it.

If there aren't enough clean beats (a noisy night, a loose strap), NOOP shows "Couldn't lock today" and falls back to a sensible default. Just try again when you're rested.

Breathe to it: once locked, your Breathe sessions pace to your resonance pace automatically. Inhale on the single light buzz, exhale on the double buzz. Screen off is fine — the buzz is the whole cue. When you finish, you get the usual outcome line, e.g. "+18% vs start · peak 64 ms."

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Layer 2 — "Calm me" in a stressed moment

This one is heart-rate-paced rather than breath-paced. NOOP reads your live heart rate and buzzes a felt metronome a few beats below it, recomputing as your heart follows, so your heart can drift down toward the rhythm.

1. On a high-stress moment — from the Stress screen or the stress check-in card — tap "Calm me · 3 min."
2. Keep the screen on or off and just feel the buzz. You'll see a minimal readout like "HR 78 → settling."
3. At the end you get an honest outcome: if your HR fell, it says so; if it didn't, it tells you plainly and offers a paced breath (Layer 1) instead. No fabricated success.

It's bounded by design: it never paces below a safe floor, never more than a few beats under your live HR, and it auto-stops.

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Layer 3 — Passive stress check-ins (optional)

Let NOOP watch quietly and offer a one-minute breathing cue at the moment a non-exercise HRV dip shows up.

Turn it on: Settings → Automations → "Stress check-ins (haptic)" (off by default). Sub-options let you set:

• Auto-nudge — whether it offers the cue automatically.
• Respect quiet hours — so it never fires overnight.
• Use my resonance pace — pace the cue to your locked pace (or a calm default).

When it fires: a single confirming buzz and a dismissible card — "Your HRV dipped while you were still — want a minute to breathe?" — with Breathe now / Not now / Turn off. It's gated to ignore exercise (a brisk walk won't trigger it), rate-limited, and never a push notification or an alarm.

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How to read it honestly

• WHOOP's beat-to-beat timing is PPG-derived, not ECG — good for trends, but HRV and the breathing "RSA" response shown here are estimates, never clinical readings.
• This is guided breathing and relaxation — not a treatment, not a medical device, not diagnostic. It never "treats" stress or anything else.
• "Stress" is an autonomic estimate from your own baseline (HR up / HRV down), not a verdict. The check-in card says "your HRV dipped while you were still," never "you are stressed."
• The "+X% vs start" outcome is this session's measured change, not a health benefit.

Privacy

Your resonance pace and session outcomes are stored as local records on your device. Nothing is uploaded, synced or shared. There is no account and no cloud.