Educational
What Is Biofeedback?
An Old Technique of Listening to the Body's Signals, Now With Instruments
👤 Luana, lead therapist at Artemisa📅 10 May 2026⏱️ 6 min
A Simple Idea
Imagine that your body has internal thermometers — for stress, muscular tension, temperature, heart rate — but you cannot see them. Biofeedback is the idea of bringing those thermometers into view, through a sensor, so that you can start working with them.
Human beings cannot change their heart rate voluntarily the way we change gear on a bicycle. But when we see on a screen how slow breathing brings the heart rate down, we learn to do it. That is what biofeedback is: making the invisible visible in order to train regulation.
A Short History
The modern term appears in the 1950s and 1960s. Joe Kamiya, at the University of Chicago, demonstrated in 1958 that people could learn to generate alpha brain waves voluntarily when given auditory feedback from their electroencephalogram. It was the first systematic proof that a process considered involuntary could be learned and modulated.
Around the same time, Robert O. Becker, an American orthopaedic surgeon, was exploring bioelectric fields in tissue regeneration. His book 'The Body Electric' (1985) gathered decades of research on the electrical properties of living beings. Although some of his conclusions are still debated, the field of bioelectricity as an object of study became established.
Today biofeedback has a substantial scientific literature in areas such as migraine, incontinence, chronic pain, neuromuscular rehabilitation and stress management. It is part of hospital programmes in many countries.
Families of Biofeedback
There is no single biofeedback. There are several families, depending on which signal of the body is being captured:
- Cardiac / heart rate variability (HRV) — for regulating stress and breathing.
- Electromyographic (EMG) — for retraining muscles, the pelvic floor, shoulder tension.
- Thermal — peripheral temperature, an indicator of the state of the autonomic nervous system.
- Skin conductance (GSR/EDA) — the 'fingerprint' of stress.
- Neurofeedback (EEG) — on brain waves, used in ADHD, anxiety and sleep.
- GDV / bioelectric field — on the bioelectric field surrounding the body, used in wellbeing explorations (this is what we do with Bio-Well and Dianel).
What We Do at Artemisa
At Artemisa we work with two instruments from the GDV (bioelectric field) family: Bio-Well and Dianel. Bio-Well captures an image of the bioelectric field using gas discharge visualisation (GDV); Dianel does something similar and, in addition, can respond with micro-stimuli during the same session.
What we offer is a functional reading: a snapshot of the moment, an honest conversation about what we see, and a few gentle suggestions for what to look after. It is not a medical diagnosis, nor does it claim to be.
Is This Backed by Science?
The classic biofeedback families (HRV, EMG, EEG) have a robust scientific literature. The GDV family (Bio-Well) sits in a mixed territory: research has been published by its creator Konstantin Korotkov and his collaborators, but mainstream medical opinion considers it complementary. At Artemisa we use it as a wellbeing tool, with honesty about what it knows and what it does not.
Who Is It For?
For people who want to understand better how their body is at a particular point in time, who are going through change or facing a decision, who feel fatigue or imbalance with no clear cause, or who are simply curious about a different way of looking. Always as a complement, never as a replacement.
Where to Start?
With the 35 € initial session (30 minutes): we talk, we run a basic reading and we walk you through what we see. No commitment, no promises.