Biofeedback for the control of physiological responses

The term biofeedback means “biological feedback”; it is defined as a procedure that allows the patient to learn to voluntarily control physiological responses that, under normal conditions, cannot be voluntarily controlled or whose control has been lost due to a pathological process.

It is a technique of biological self-control, which consists of giving the patient constant and precise information about the physiological response being worked on. In this way, when the brain receives constant information, it learns to modulate and control these responses.

Types of responses

  1. Neurovegetative responses: among the neurovegetative responses we have blood pressure, body temperature, heart rate, pain… Biofeedback helps to control these neurovegetative responses, so that the patient learns to control these types of responses.
  2. Motor responses: when biofeedback is used to help the patient learn to control motor responses, it is called biofeedback-electromyogram. It serves to recover the neuromuscular integration, which is the integration between the nerve and the contraction of the muscle fiber, it is as if the patient forgot how to contract the muscle, biofeedback is used in these cases to re-educate the muscle contraction. It is also used to re-educate hypertonic muscles, so that the patient learns to lower the tone, that is to say, to relax.

The phases of biofeedback

  1. A first phase that records the physiological response to be modified, muscle contraction, blood pressure, temperature or the chosen parameter.
  2. A second phase of transformation of the physiological response into a signal perceptible by the patient, when an adequate contraction is achieved, the device emits the signal and the patient associates the sound with the good performance of the exercise.

Depending on the type of signals sent by the device, there are different types of signals: auditory signals, light signals, combined auditory and light signals.

Depending on the signal reached, there are 2 types of Biofeedback:

  1. Sweep biofeedback: they respond to all or nothing, i.e. if the patient reaches the response the signal appears and if the minimum activity is not reached, no signal appears.
  2. Proportional biofeedback: in these, the intensity of the signal will increase as the patient approaches the desired response intensity.