Science Behind The LYEONS Heart
Exploring how gentle multisensory stimulation may support responses to stress and anxiety.
Heartbeat-like tactile & audio feedback
Subtle pulses and soft tones follow a calm, steady heartbeat cadence. These cues may encourage physiological synchrony, helping heart rate and breathing settle towards steadier patterns.
Breathing-like visual guidance
An expand–contract light pattern follows slow respiratory pacing supporting breath–rhythm synchrony, steadiness, and co-regulation.
Personalised stimulation
Matching the stimulation to someone’s natural rhythms promotes comfort and a sense of stability, and may make synchrony easier to achieve.
Explore How It Works
For Everyone
Stress and anxiety don’t just affect the mind, they also affect the body. When your nervous system is in a high-alert state, your heart rate, breathing, and focus can all become disrupted.
At LYEONS, we are exploring whether gentle multisensory stimulation – touch, sound, and light – can help ease these responses. The idea is simple: provide the body with subtle cues that may support moments of calm and steadiness, without requiring training or conscious effort.
In our early testing, people have reported benefits such as feeling more settled in stressful situations, and we have observed measurable reductions in heart rate. While these are still early-stage studies, the results encourage us to keep learning, with the hope of offering more accessible support for everyday life.
If you would like to share your experiences of stress and anxiety, or be part of our early user community, we would love to hear from you.
For Therapists & Carers
Current approaches to stress and anxiety often require active engagement: breathing exercises, mindfulness, or therapy techniques. These are powerful tools, but they can be difficult to access when stress is overwhelming.
LYEONS Heart is designed as a complementary support tool:
- It provides gentle, multisensory stimulation that can be used discreetly during daily life.
- It may offer a sense of steadiness between therapy sessions or in moments when active techniques are hard to apply.
- It could also serve as a non-invasive aid for individuals who find it difficult to engage with cognitive strategies during acute stress.
We see this as a way to work alongside existing practices, adding another layer of support. As we expand our studies, we hope to collaborate with therapists, carers, and practitioners to better understand how this approach can fit into real-world care.
If you are a therapist or carer interested in this area, we would love to hear from you. Please feel free to contact us – we are always open to learning and collaborating.
Potential Use Cases
During Therapy Sessions
Gentle multisensory input that can support regulation and grounding, helping you focus on the work with your therapist.
In Moments of Overwhelm
Discreet multisensory cues to steady attention when stress spikes. Useful when other techniques feel out of reach.
Between Therapy Sessions
Gentle support to help maintain continuity between sessions. LYEONS Heart may support self-regulation and reinforce what you are practising.
For Researchers & Scientists
A growing body of research indicates that gentle sensory stimulation, including tactile, auditory, and visual input, can influence autonomic regulation. Rhythmic auditory stimulation has been shown to entrain physiological rhythms and modulate heart-rate variability and shared attentional states (Silva, Araújo & Valenti, 2024; Wright & Palmer, 2023; Pérez et al., 2021).
Light touch and affective social touch have been linked to reductions in perceived stress and increases in interpersonal co-regulation (Goldstein, Weissman-Fogel & Shamay-Tsoory, 2017; Kidd, Poole & Steptoe, 2023). Vibrotactile and vibroacoustic stimulation have also shown potential for modulating autonomic arousal and supporting emotional self-regulation (Fooks & Niebuhr, 2024).
Visual and multisensory cues have also been associated with synchronised physiological responses, increased attentional focus, and improved task engagement (Stuldreher, van Erp, & Brouwer, 2023; Marucci et al., 2021).
Together, these findings suggest that subtle sensory input may play a meaningful role in modulating stress, supporting anxiety relief, and strengthening social connectedness. Although the underlying mechanisms are still under investigation, current research highlights promising opportunities for non-invasive intervention approaches.
If you are a researcher or clinician interested in this field, we would be pleased to connect. Please feel free to reach out to share perspectives or explore potential collaborations.
Show references
Silva, B.C.S., Araújo, E.A. & Valenti, V.E. (2024) ‘The effects of auditory stimulation on heart rate variability in healthy individuals with normal hearing and with hearing loss: a systematic review and meta-analysis’, CoDAS, 36(4), e20230111. https://doi.org/10.1590/2317-1782/20242023111en
Wright, S.E. & Palmer, C. (2023) ‘Auditory rhythm complexity affects cardiac dynamics in perception and synchronization’, PLOS ONE, 18(11), e0293882. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0293882
Pérez, P., Madsen, J., Banellis, L., Türker, B., Raimondo, F., Perlbarg, V., Valente, M., Niérat, M-C., Puybasset, L., Naccache, L., Similowski, T., Cruse, D., Parra, L.C. & Sitt, J.D. (2021) ‘Conscious processing of narrative stimuli synchronizes heart rate between individuals’, Cell Reports, 36(11), 109692. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109692
Goldstein, P., Weissman-Fogel, I. & Shamay-Tsoory, S.G. (2017) ‘The role of touch in regulating inter-partner physiological coupling during empathy for pain’, Scientific Reports, 7, 3252. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-03627-7
Kidd, T., Poole, L. & Steptoe, A. (2023) ‘Affective touch and regulation of stress responses’, Health Psychology Review, 17(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2022.2143854
Fooks, C. & Niebuhr, O. (2024) ‘Effects of Vibroacoustic Stimulation on Psychological, Physiological, and Cognitive Stress’, Sensors (Basel), 24(18), 5924. https://doi.org/10.3390/s24185924
Stuldreher, I. V., van Erp, J. B. F., & Brouwer, A.-M. (2023). Robustness of physiological synchrony in wearable electrodermal activity and heart rate as a measure of attentional engagement to movie clips. Sensors, 23(6), Article 3006. https://doi.org/10.3390/s23063006
Marucci, M., Di Flumeri, G., Borghini, G., Sciaraffa, N., Scandola, M., Pavone, E. F., Babiloni, F., Betti, V., Aricò, P. & others (2021). The impact of multisensory integration and perceptual load in virtual reality settings on performance, workload and presence. Scientific Reports, 11, Article 4831. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-84196-8
Science is a journey, and this is where we are now. Early signs are promising, but we are committed to openly sharing both progress and limitations. Together – with users, practitioners, and researchers – we aim to build a deeper understanding of how non-invasive stimulation can support people in responding to stress and anxiety.