What ONDA is built on — and what we’re building toward.
Most wellness apps blur two very different things: the science behind what they actually do, and the science they’d like to be associated with. We keep them separate. Below is both — the established evidence the app rests on today, cited in plain sight, and the research frontier we’re working to validate with partners. We’d rather under-claim than oversell.
The evidence behind what the app does today
Everything in the ONDA app right now rests on mechanisms with a real evidence base. For each claim we show the sources, exactly what ONDA does with the mechanism, and — just as important — what the evidence does not prove.
Slow, paced breathing raises HRV in the moment. [R1]
Every ONDA session is guided slow breathing with live heart-rhythm feedback, so you can see your heart rhythm respond as you breathe.
That a single session raises HRV acutely is well established. That regular practice produces a large, permanent rise in everyone’s resting baseline is not — the size and durability of the effect vary between people, which is why ONDA leads with your own trend rather than a promise.
HRV biofeedback trains autonomic balance, not just measures it. [R1] [R3]
ONDA closes the loop: you breathe, you watch your own heart rhythm respond in real time, and the practice adapts. That is HRV biofeedback — an active technique for engaging vagal (parasympathetic) activity, not a passive readout.
The mechanism (baroreflex and vagal engagement) is supported; the magnitude of long-term change in autonomic balance for a given individual, and how it translates to specific health outcomes, remains an active research question.
Interoception — the felt sense of the body — is a real, trainable capacity. [R4]
ONDA’s live-feedback practice is interoceptive training: attending to the felt sense of breath and heartbeat while a visible signal confirms what you feel.
Craig establishes interoception as a distinct neural sense with a clear cortical basis. That a phone-based practice measurably improves interoceptive accuracy, and that this transfers to everyday emotional regulation, is plausible and supported by broader work but is not proven by this foundational reference alone.
Resting HRV is a meaningful multi-day trend, not a daily verdict. [R2]
ONDA reads your resting-HRV trend from your device (via Apple Health) and leads with the direction over weeks, rather than gamifying any single morning reading.
HRV is a useful marker of self-regulation and health at the group level; it is not a diagnostic test, and an individual day’s number is noisy. A higher HRV is not automatically “better” in every context.
During practice with an Apple Watch, ONDA shows a live coherence score — a real-time signal of how smooth and rhythmic your heart rhythm is as you breathe. Your longer-term resting-HRV trend is read from your device via Apple Health. We’re precise about this on purpose: coherence is the in-the-moment guide; the resting-HRV trend is the outcome to watch over weeks.
Closed-loop, structured, and built on a method
Two things make ONDA different from a meditation library or a passive tracker.
A real feedback loop
You breathe, you watch your own heart rhythm respond in real time, and the practice adapts. Most apps score you after. ONDA shows you during — which is what makes a practice you can actually feel working, and stick with.
Structure, not a buffet
ONDA is a sequential path — each level builds on the last — rather than a shuffle of unrelated sessions. The structure is the point: it removes the “what do I do today?” decision and gives the practice a direction.
Who’s behind it
ONDA was built method-first, with the engineering owned end-to-end.
Yakiv
- ▸Lead developer responsible for ONDA's high-fidelity data pipeline.
- ▸1,871+ commits on the core codebase (iOS, Android, Supabase).
- ▸Building an open pipeline for academic data export.
More on the founder: Yakiv Bilenko — architect and Gestalt therapist who builds ONDA. His expertise is architecture, psychology and engineering, not clinical neuroscience.
The research frontier
Everything in this section describes directions we’re actively exploring and hypotheses we want to validate with scientific partners. It is not a description of outcomes the app delivers or biomarkers it measures today. We’re putting it here, openly, because we think the ambition is worth being honest about.
Longitudinal autonomic adaptation
Whether consistent biofeedback practice produces durable shifts in resting HRV and autonomic balance over months — and how to measure that honestly at the individual level.
Cortisol awakening response (CAR)
CAR as a stress-recovery marker, and whether daily practice correlates with healthier CAR patterns.
Vision — ONDA does not measure cortisol today.
Neuroplasticity correlates (BDNF)
The literature linking contemplative and aerobic practices to neuroplasticity markers such as BDNF, and whether structured breath practice contributes. Early, largely indirect evidence — background reading only.
Vision — not a measured app outcome.
Gamma-band coherence in advanced practitioners
EEG signatures described in long-term meditators, and what a consumer practice can and cannot say about them honestly.
Frontier / experiential — explicitly the “edge of the map,” consistent with the Level 8 copy.
Multi-biomarker, multi-device integration
Extending beyond HRV — combining signals from the wearables people already own into a fuller, still-honest picture of nervous-system state.
Each of these is a direction, not a deliverable. As evidence and our own data mature, anything that proves out moves up into the “what we build on” section above — with citations. Until then, it stays here, clearly marked as what it is.
How we decide what we’re allowed to say
A few commitments that govern this whole site:
▸ We measure what the device can measure — HRV from your wearable, via Apple Health — and we don’t dress surrogate signals up as clinical ones.
▸ The trend beats the number. We won’t gamify a single bad morning reading into anxiety.
▸ A claim earns its place by citation. If a mechanism is in the app, its evidence is on this page. If the evidence isn’t there yet, the claim lives in “where we’re going,” not in the product.
▸ We’d rather show real reviews than fake ones, and real evidence than borrowed authority.
Researchers and partners
We’re building ONDA with people who hold us to the evidence. If you work in autonomic physiology, contemplative neuroscience, digital biomarkers, or HRV research — or you run a study that needs a structured, instrumented breath-practice tool — we’d like to talk.
Get in touch →Sources
These are the mechanisms the app rests on today. The research-frontier directions above are described in hypothesis tense and, where the evidence is still early, left deliberately uncited rather than dressed in a citation.
- [R1] Lehrer PM, Gevirtz R (2014). Heart rate variability biofeedback: how and why does it work?. Frontiers in Psychology.Narrative review
- [R2] Thayer JF, Hansen AL, Saus-Rose E, Johnsen BH (2009). Heart rate variability, prefrontal neural function, and cognitive performance: the neurovisceral integration perspective on self-regulation, adaptation, and health. Annals of Behavioral Medicine.Review / theoretical
- [R3] Porges SW (2007). The polyvagal perspective. Biological Psychology.Review / theoretical
- [R4] Craig AD (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.Review
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