There are many home and wearable devices that include a form of biofeedback. Rings and watches now record things like heart rate, heart rate variability, skin conductance and skin temperature.  They can give a person some information, but they are not the same as professional biofeedback.

Where is professional biofeedback provided?  I will list a few places where professional biofeedback is available.

1. Private mental health offices. Some psychologists, social workers, and mental health counselors provide biofeedback and neurofeedback in their offices along with their other services.  They use biofeedback for helping people with anxiety, insomnia, panic attacks, PTSD.
2. Pain management clinics that help people with neck and back pain may offer biofeedback along with other interventions like physical therapy, chiropractic, and acupuncture. Physical therapists often use surface EMG to help train their clients to use their muscles properly and to reduce chronic tension.
3. Headache clinics may offer professional biofeedback to help people with tension or migraine headaches. Surface EMG biofeedback is used to help people learn to become of unnecessary muscle tension that might be contributing to their headaches.  They help them learn how to release the tension.  They might also use temperature biofeedback to help clients learn how to relax.
4. College and University counseling centers are beginning to offer professional biofeedback and neurofeedback services to students. When students come to the counseling center with symptoms like anxiety, including test anxiety, insomnia, depression, PTSD, or panic attacks, they may be offered biofeedback as an option to help with their symptoms.
5. Hospitals including Veterans Administration hospitals and children’s hospitals may offer biofeedback in one of many departments including psychology, mental health, behavioral health, pain management, or rehab medicine.

When a person receives biofeedback services from one of these sources, they are usually working with a provider who has been trained and is using professional equipment.  The provider is able to not only put sensors on them, but also provide the psycho education, which is crucial to getting the full potential value of using biofeedback.  I suggest that the watches, rings, and other similar consumer devices should mainly be used in addition to professional biofeedback and not in leu of for best results.

Harry L. Campbell,

Biofeedback Resources International Corporation