Transform Wellness Center · Dayton, Maryland · 27 October 2026
One Reiki session, beat by beat.
A client lay down for a 45-minute treatment: a massage and finishing mask, then Reiki, a few minutes of rest, and a scalp massage with a little more Reiki to close. She wore an ECG chest strap and the Autonomic® app the whole time. This is what her heart did.
The whole session
Heart rate, heart-rate variability and movement on one timeline, with each part of the treatment shaded. Hover or tap for values at any moment.
HRV is RMSSD, the beat-to-beat variation in heart rhythm, over a rolling one-minute window. Higher usually means a more relaxed, rest-and-digest state. Movement comes from the accelerometer in the chest strap, smoothed over 30 seconds. She lay almost perfectly still, so these are tiny movements, mostly breathing; only lasting changes mean much.
Part by part
Each part of the treatment compared with her five-minute baseline at the start (the gray dot and line).
Average heart rate
Average HRV (RMSSD)
What happened, and when
Times are minutes from the start of the treatment, after the baseline. The treatment notes come from the practitioner's account afterwards, so the boundaries are approximate.
Heartbeat close-ups
Six seconds of raw ECG from each part of the session, on the same scale. Count the beats: fewer per strip means a slower heart.
How it was measured
A Movesense ECG chest strap recorded the heart's electrical signal 250 times a second and movement about 100 times a second, streamed through the Autonomic® app. The app first recorded a five-minute resting baseline, then the treatment session. All 2,732 heartbeat intervals in the session fell in the normal range, and the strap never dropped out.
This is one session with one person, so it shows what happened, not why. Heart rate and HRV also respond to breathing, posture, temperature, touch and drifting toward sleep. Nothing here is a medical measurement or diagnosis.
Suggestions for next time
Ideas to try, based on this one session. They are worth testing, not conclusions.
End on Reiki, then rest. Try massage, then scalp massage, then Reiki, then three to five minutes of quiet rest. This session ended on the scalp massage, its most stimulated stretch (heart rate about 64 to 69, HRV at its lowest). Her calmest moment came in the quiet rest after the Reiki (HRV 59 ms at minute 29.5).
Keep a quiet rest at the very end. The biggest move toward calm came in the stillness after hands-on work, not during it. Don't go straight from the last technique to getting up.
Take a second look at the scalp massage. Heart rate rose sharply around minute 36 and stayed up until the end. It could be the scalp work itself, or something at the same moment, such as a change of position or talking. A note of anything like that would help tell them apart.
Keep the five-minute baseline at the start. Every part is compared with it, so keep its length and conditions the same each time.
Record a short wind-down. Leave the strap on for three to five minutes after the treatment while she lies quietly. That shows the state she actually leaves in.
Note the times as you go. The practitioner's account is what lined the data up with the treatment. Start and stop times for each part, plus anything unusual (talking, coughing, shifting, a change of music), make the next analysis much more precise.
Change one thing at a time. If the order changes, keep the length of each part, the room and the time of day about the same, so any difference can be put down to the order.
Compare several sessions before deciding. One session is a starting point. After three or four sessions with each order, the comparison starts to mean something, and the sessions can be shown side by side.
