Born from joint research between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Apollo was developed by physicians and neuroscientists to offer a drug-free tool to empower people to take control over their stress.
When you wear an Apollo, you feel gentle waves of vibration through your touch receptor system. These vibration patterns are designed to replicate natural heart, respiratory, and brain wave patterns that occur within the body when we meditate, deep breathe and enter deep states of focus.
When you are stressed out or overwhelmed (emotionally, mentally, or physically) and you take a moment for a deep breath, your intentional attention to your breath tells your brain and body that you are safe (because you have the time to pay attention to your breath at that moment) resulting in increased parasympathetic nervous system activity. As you practice this over time, your body learns to establish a balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems more effectively by learning what it means to be and feel balanced.
This was originally discovered through the study of biofeedback dating back to the 1960s [2]. In the traditional practice of biofeedback, a subject is connected to an electrocardiogram (ECG) to measure the electrical rhythm of the heart and a respiratory band that measures breath speed and depth. Once the subject sees their heart and respiratory rhythms on a screen, they are asked to do whatever they need to do to make the rhythms match closer together. It turns out that roughly 95% of subjects match their heart and breathing rhythms within 90 seconds [2]. When our rhythms match in biofeedback is when we are breathing at around 6 breaths per minute, which is when our heart rate variability starts to go up in a measurable way and when most of us report feeling calmer. Entering this state on a regular basis also happens to correlate strongly with a reduction in symptoms of many chronic mental and physical illnesses. This breathing rate of 6 breaths/minute is also right around where we begin to enter a more ‘meditative’ or mindful state.
Apollo’s curated vibratory waves are very similar to this goal breathing rate experienced in biofeedback, deep breathing, and meditation, resulting in similar benefits, but in near real-time and without effort. Just like turning your attention to your breath, Apollo vibrations help to center attention back in the body, signaling safety to the emotional cortex in the brain, stimulating parasympathetic (rest and digest) activity and reducing unwanted sympathetic (fight-or-flight) activity.
Apollo has been shown in clinical trials to rapidly increase parasympathetic activity, helping to restore the body under stress.
