 What's going on everybody, it's Dave with AlexFergus.com and today I'm going to be going over a product that I was sent for the purposes of this review. We're going to be taking a look at the Inner Balance Heart Rate Variability Coherence Sensor and App. Now the two work together to help you train your autonomic nervous system to get into coherence with itself. Well, if you don't know what HRV is, it's Heart Rate Variability. It's the span of time between each of your heart beats. So it's not exactly your heart rate, it's the amount of distance and time between each heartbeat. And what this product aims to do is through a series of breathing exercises bring your HRV into coherence which means it's a specific pattern of HRV in sync with your breathing. It goes along hand in hand by balancing the two halves of your autonomic nervous system. You have the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. Now you can think of your parasympathetic nervous system as the rest and recover and your sympathetic nervous system on the other side as the fight or flight response. And you don't want to have your autonomic nervous system shifted one direction or the other and you don't want to go on too much of one or too much of the other. You want the two to exist in coherence and that's what this product aims to do. Okay, so we are taking a look now at the hardware for the inner balance by HeartMath. This is the Lightning Edition that's the corded version. They also do make a Bluetooth wireless version. So this is the box that it comes in. This is what it looks like from HeartMath. So let's open it up. There's really not a lot to this product. As I said, most of the magic happens in the app. So this is what you will be presented with. You've got the actual sensor that clips on your ear right there along with the connector for your iOS device, the Lightning connector. You will get a travel bag right here. Just take a open it up here. So it's just just a cloth bag. It's not microfiber. It's not fuzzy fleece. It's just some kind of synthetic bag. So there's that. And then you're going to have a little instruction booklet here. Open that up. And it's basically a quick start guide. So basically telling you to download the app and then tap the screen and hit the start icon after you've plugged in the sensor and put it on your earlobe. And there's some quick coherence techniques right there. And basically consistency is key. You can share with a friend. And yeah, it's really a bare bones quick start guide to the device itself. So let's take the device out and get a closer look at it. So this is the sensor itself. And it's got some foam on each side there. And that's what clips on your ear. And as you can see on each side is one of those PPG sensors, like we see with the BIO strap or the Aura. And then there's a little alligator clip. You can slide up and down along the length of the cord here to clip onto your clothing to help hold the cord in place. And then there's this kind of brick looking thing here. I am not sure what that's for. I assume that's basically a converter between lightning, between lightning and whatever cord this is. It's just some sort of converter. But this is the lightning connector here. It looks very standard. Looks just as good a quality as the Apple branded charging cables. So I don't see any concerns there with it falling apart. So there's that. And the cord is a pretty good length. Let me see. I can't show you the full length of the cord. But I mean, I'd say it's a good meter. It's a good meter. So yeah, you've got plenty of length here if you want to put it in your pocket or set your phone down somewhere else. There's really not a lot to go through inside this box. The instructions here are, like I said, just a quick start. You do get a little travel bag. Very minimalist. Yeah, like I said, most of the magic for this product is going to be happening inside the app, which we'll take a look at next. So with that said, let's go ahead and take a look at the HeartMath Inner Balance app itself and where the magic for this product actually happens. OK, so we are taking a look at the Inner Balance app from HeartMath. So this is the home screen that you see when you first open the app. You're going to see a multicolored circle in the middle that is your breath pacer. Now right now, I don't have a session going. So you're not going to see the breath pacer getting bigger and smaller like it would during a session. So from the home screen, let's go from the top to the bottom. So in the upper left-hand corner, you've got the option wheel. Let's open that up. You've got your session, your display options, your mood selection, your reminder, your health syncing with your iOS device, login and sync to the HeartMath cloud so that your sessions can be stored there and saved so that if you lose your phone or something and you redownload the app, you can get access to your pass scores. App and sensor info, support, and then you can do a full reset. So starting at the top under session, this is where most of the tweaks that you can do to your session are going to be found. So you can change the music volume in the soundtrack if you choose to upload your own music and soundtrack into the session, which you just hit the select. And on iOS device, it pulls up Apple Music. So it uses the default music player in iOS, which is Apple Music. So I mean, I use Spotify, so for me, I'd have to actually download some music into Apple Music to be able to use that function. Cloud effect volume is next, and you can either turn completely off with this toggle switch or turn it on. And when your coherence goes up or goes down, you'll hear an audible chime, kind of like an upbeat chime when your coherence goes up and kind of a wham when it goes down. And so you can have it selected for on coherence change or not. And feedback I really haven't played around with, but that might be handy if you've got the device in your pocket and you don't have it where you can see it. So that's, you know, same thing on session start, on session end, and on coherence change. So you can toggle those individually on or off. Now challenge level and breath pacer, those are the two biggest functions found in these session settings. Challenge level, I'm currently trying out number three out of four, and it's no joke. I recommend, I guess, everybody start off, should probably start off on star number one, and then incrementally increase as they feel their abilities is progressing. There you go, there's the four different levels. Level one is pretty easy. I think most people would be able to master level one probably in just a few sessions. Level two, I stayed there for quite a while. Level three is, like I said, the newest level, and that's pretty hard. Now breath pacer is the time in between the inhale and the exhale that you're going to pause. So it says down here dragging the slider right increases the time interval in seconds between each breath. So you can play around with that to find what works for you. Session timer, so you can either turn a timer on or turn a timer off, and you can say timer stop session. So after your timer is done, the session will stop. Or if you just want to continue to keep going, you can set it so that, like I have it turned off so the session will just continue and I can just keep going. I like to kind of keep it open-ended, like I like to know that my 5, 10, 20 minute session is over, but I'm not, you know, forced to stop. I can stop if I choose, but so I think that's a really kind of a nice feature actually. And then the session timer right there is all the way up to 60 minutes. I usually have been doing anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes. So okay, and my inspiration is you have the ability to upload or import an image or video from your photo library. So that's pretty cool. And you can either, if you do a video, you can have it so that the video sound plays or not during a session. Okay, session display options. So you've got all the different, these actually are different, these one, two, three, four, the mandala, the chaser, my inspiration in advance view are the different screens that you can swipe to during your session. I've got all of them turned on so that I have access to all of them during my session. And I'll go over each one of those in just a moment. And visibility, coach, mini HRV, and mini breath pacer are also little widgets that appear in the window during your session. And you can do different themes with different colors, which is kind of nice. So I just leave it on default for now. Reminders if you want to set a reminder to do a session, you've got that. I did forget the mood selection visibility option. So before you start a session, or after a session is completed, or when you do a journal entry, kind of like a wheel with an arrow, kind of like a game show will pop up with different emoticons around it to indicate your mood. So it's not just like a smiley face, but it's a smiley face with a color associated with it. So you can say, I'm yellow and I'm smiling. So that's, and that kind of shows you how you felt before a session, how you felt after a session, and during a journal entry, if you're just doing a standalone journal entry and not actually doing it in conjunction with a session. So you have that as well. And you'll see that in just a moment when I actually plug in the sensor and start a session. App and sensor info, pretty standard stuff here, folks. You can either toggle the analytics to developer on or off, sensor name, hardware, firmware, sensor location, battery level in the event that you had the Bluetooth wireless version. I'm not sure what classroom mode is. I have a feeling that's probably for clinics and things like that for psychiatrists and psychologists. I'm not messed around with that. And I think, oh, there's a reset also at the bottom to reset everything. I haven't touched that because I haven't have no need to reset anything. So those are, that's settings. Up here, you have the question mark for help. And it does a pretty good job kind of going over all of the major pieces of nomenclature or terminology that the HeartMath Institute uses in their inner balance product. So if you wanna read through that, it can give you some more insight and background into the technology and the process of what you're doing while you're going through a session. Okay, and then down below you've got the little smiley face down there next to the play. That is your mood. And you'll see this again when I start a session, because I did have that selection turned on. So you can select a mood, tap the face that matches your mood. And you also notice that there are colors associated with those faces. You've got the review that shows you your scores along with your achievement, your coherence, how long your session was. And then across the top you've got graphs that you can look at, your achievement awards that you can get. Let's take a look at this green one here. Lifetime achievement of 2,500 points, awesome. So that's kind of neat. It reminds me a little bit of the Muse app and how you can get achievements that way. The goals, so right now, I practice three times a day for five minutes, 300 points a day. And these goals change as you use the app more, which is kind of neat. And like I said, there's the history and you can pull up like an individual session here. And you get to see what level I was at. You can see how long you were in low coherence, medium and high coherence. The average coherence ratio, the length of the session and how many achievement points. And then down here, this multicolored graph with the white line shows your coherence over time. And then the other graph shows, and I can scroll through it, shows what my HRV values were during the session itself. And both of these you can scroll through. So, go back, go back, journal. And you can review how you felt at any given time during these, before and after a session. So you can kind of go through and see like maybe you were in a period of your life that had a lot of stress. And you can see how that affected your coherence scores. Guides, these are like kind of like guided meditation sort of in a way down here. Guided heart meditations, talks and heart meditations down here in blue. And then the orange ones are like video tours, like welcome to interbalance, it's a video. Don't think it'll play. Let's see if we can get it to play. Yeah, here we go. So they've got like a little explainer video talking about what heart math is and how it works. So that's kind of neat that it's built right into the app. You don't have to go to a, what it doesn't say, go to this website or open up your web browser. And then heart cloud, if you click on that at the bottom, this is where your scores are synced into the cloud. And this is how you can share and export your sessions out like latest sessions. Let's see here. Daily achievement totals. And then it also top community achievement scores. So I haven't quite gotten into being competitive with the community on this app. But you do have the ability to do that if you want to. So you want to cancel. OK, so yeah, you can, heart cloud. OK. Yeah, there's a way that you can export your session out of here. There's a lot of information on this screen. But it's basically where your scores are uploaded into the cloud and you can compare how you're stacking up against the rest of the community. So let's go back to session. And I'm going to actually plug in the inner balance sensor here. So give me a moment here. OK, got plugged in. Make sure that it's on my ear. And I'm going to hit the start button. And you'll see that it's going to ask me how I'm feeling. I'm feeling like that. Because I'm doing a video for all you wonderful people. Now you'll see the mandala of the circle in the middle is growing and shrinking. And I'm supposed to be breathing in time with that. Sort of like the calm app. Now this little dot right below the squiggly line, that is going to light up with the color of my coherence level. Red if it's low, blue if it's medium. Green if it's high. And then right above that, that squiggly line, that is my HRV score, my heart rate variability. You can see that I'm in low coherence because I'm not actually following the breathing. So if I swipe right, I can choose to view this screen and follow the breath that way. So you've got in and out from an expanding and shrinking multicolored flower type thing. Or you can go back and forth with these sweeping lines. Or if you want to use your own image, or in my case the image that heart math interbalance comes with, you can stare at and focus on a peaceful image that inspires thoughts of love and positivity. Or even a video. So there's that. And then across the top up there you'll notice this little ball bouncing back and forth. That's your breath pacer that tells you breathe in, breathe out, breathe in. And then if you swipe to the right one more time, you come to the advanced screen that shows your coherence level, your current coherence level, your current session length, and how many achievement points you have currently as the session can. Obviously I just gained some more achievement points. And then you'll see your HRV graph down there. So it looks like my HRV is somewhere between 70 and 105. And you can see over time, in real time actually, what your HRV is doing. Which is kind of neat. I don't have any other sensors that actually give me real time HRV data. And then below that is this three colored coherence over time. And it tracks forwards showing that it looks like I started off down in the red, moved up into the blue, somehow got up into the green since I've been recording this for you guys, dropped back down into the blue. And then spectrum is the frequency. There's my pulse rate. So this is the advanced view. OK. And it also has the little sideways scrolling ball that goes back and forth as your breath pacer. In any one of these screens, you can always tap the screen itself to pull up the controls to stop your session or adjust the volume. So let's go back to the home screen here. And I will tap this and stop. And I get to choose my mood. So I am still in a great mood. So done. There we go. And it's going to give me my session overview. So there you go. I got 64 coherence points. My average coherence was pretty low at 2.3. But one nice thing is if I want to share this on social media or on a website or something, I can click the share button here. So yeah, you can share your scores in your session directly out of the app to other apps, which is kind of cool. I think that's pretty much it for the app itself. It's, you know, it does look a little bit dated. There is quite a few settings here to tweak with. So it can be kind of hard to figure out and get yourself dialed in. But really, this is where the magic happens. This is where it all comes together. Because the HRV sensor that it comes with is pretty much just a red PPG sensor that you would find on the BioStrap or even the ORA ring. It's not really any different. The magic is all in how your HRV coherence is calculated using this app. So anyway, that is a look at the Interbalance app itself. So let's go down and take a look at some pros and cons and wrap it up. OK, so we've taken a look at what comes in the box, how the hardware is put together, and we've also taken a look at the app and seen how the different modes of breathing exercises work to get you into coherence and HRV biofeedback training and how it works. So is the Interbalance by HeartMath Institute something that you might want to start including into your daily routine to reduce your overall levels of stress? Some pros and some cons. So first on the list is a con. I think that the wired version is a little bit cumbersome. It does have a little clip here, so you can clip it to your clothing. But it does kind of feel like there's something hanging off your ear. And it does kind of interfere a little bit. Also, the plug on this, the lightning plug that I have, is a little fat. If you've got a headphone jack next to it or you have a case, it might not fit. But that's really all I can see as far as the hardware side of it. It's solidly built hardware. It's quality built hardware. As far as the app goes, I'd like to see a refresh done with the app. The app looks like it's kind of getting old and long in the tooth. HeartMath Institute does have a second app available called Global Coherence, which is a much newer app. And it's a lot more updated looking. The look and feel of that app is very 2019. It's also a little bit complicated if you aren't used to the app. There's a lot of ins and outs and different modes and there's different settings. And it can be a little bit overwhelming, to be honest. I mean, if you don't have a lot of time to dedicate to figuring out the app itself, you might end up just saying, eh, and putting it on the shelf. So maybe a refresh on the app, because that really truly is where the magic happens. I think that the app being as important as it is to the overall HeartMath HRV Coherence training as it is, that they really should spend some time refreshing and simplifying the app. Because, like I said, it can be a little bit daunting with all of the different options available. Pro is that I like the fact that you can upload your own photo or video. I also like the fact that there's a couple of ways that you can export and share your data out of the HeartMath Interbalance app itself. That's something that's missing from other apps like the Muse meditation headband. Now, I do know as far as among the Muse community of users themselves, there are a lot of crossover people that use both the HeartMath and the Muse together. The type of breathing that you have to do with the Interbalance is completely different than the type of breathing that I do when I meditate. I've tried using my meditation breathing with the HeartMath and I was getting crazy low coherence scores. I tried using the coherence breathing with HeartMath with my Muse and it ended up distracting me and not making for a very calm, deep meditation experience. So they don't really seem to be something, like a skill you can learn and apply to one another. The two different technologies might compliment each other by overall reducing your stress levels. But I don't think you can take what you learn from one and apply it to the other. I do like the fact that there is a wired version and a wireless version. I think that's awesome. For people that don't want to be exposing themselves to extra Bluetooth, low frequency energy, they can choose the wired version. Initially, it was thought and why I was sent the wired version was that I could wear the Bluetooth wireless Muse headband, this guy. I could wear this at the same time I was using this because I wouldn't be using two different Bluetooth devices at the same time. Unfortunately, in my experience and experimentation, using both the Muse app and the Interbalance app at the same time does not work. For me, as soon as my Muse session is over and I switch over to the Interbalance app, the Interbalance app will crash before I'm able to get any of my data out of it. So unfortunately, even going with a wired version of the Interbalance heart math product, I was not able to do both at the same time. I like the fact that it's portable. I mean, even the wired version, I mean, I can fold this up fairly small. Let me see if I can, you know, I can get, you know, it's about the size of a pair of wired earbuds, you know, and I can put a rubber band around this and take it with me anywhere I go. And, you know, I can pop into, you know, a bathroom, a restroom. I can go into a lounge at an airport. I can go, you know, in a hotel room and practice HRV coherence training with this device. And it's very small and very lightweight. It doesn't feel super fragile. It doesn't feel very liable to break now compared to like the Muse, which is kind of flimsy. And you definitely want to get a case for that. I think you could probably just put this in a small bag and take it with you wherever you go. So overall, I think the Interbalance device and the HRV coherence training is a very positive thing because I can actually tell after you use the Interbalance system for a while and you start getting high coherence scores, you definitely can feel a shift in the stress load on your body. And so you kind of get into this zen, almost flow-like state. And I believe that's exactly what you want to do when you're trying to use biofeedback to train your body and your autonomic and your autonomic nervous system. And I just, I don't think that you're gonna be able to get that just by watching a flower get bigger and smaller through an app like Calm. You definitely want to be able to see in real time if you're actually hitting that coherence level. And that's why this product is so interesting to me because you can over time get to know that feeling of HRV coherence so intrinsically that you won't even need this device. You can go somewhere and just find a quiet place and do some breathing exercises and that feeling, that flow state that you get into, you'll know that you're actually in HRV coherence. Just like with the Muse headband, I can go somewhere and not even have to use the headband and meditate in a quiet area and know that I'm getting into a deep meditative state because my body is so familiar with the sensation of being in a deep meditative state as I've seen my data correlate in the Muse app. So using this on a regular basis, your body and your mind will get to know what HRV coherence feels like and you'll be able to replicate and reproduce that even without this device. How would I rate this product? Well, I don't really like to give a hard yes and a hard no and scales of one to 10 can be a little bit subjective for a lot of people. For me and my personal use, I would give this probably a seven or eight out of 10. The real magic happens in the app and as much as I'd like to see them revamp the app and update it to make it a little bit slicker, a little bit simpler and maybe just more with the times, I think it's a great product overall. I think the price is a little bit steep for some people and I think you probably can get a lot of the same benefits out of other apps which are just not going to be able to get the level of detail about what your body is doing and how the two halves of your autonomic nervous system are working together without a product like this. You can get some of the same benefits but you're just not gonna be able to get the results as quickly and I think as easily. There's tons of tutorials inside the app itself. It's a huge community. It's been around forever but I definitely think if this is something that you're interested in and you're on the fence about, definitely check it out and purchase one of these because I think that overall it's a tool that you can take with you just about anywhere in practice.