Luminarsphere™ · Research

Research collaboration

Luminarsphere™ operates a deployable platform for measuring group psychophysiology in real venues — yoga and breathwork studios, sound baths, and immersive domes. We work with academic investigators who want to study collective states outside the laboratory.

The platform

The system captures photoplethysmography (PPG) simultaneously from every participant in a room via wrist-worn Molaband™ units, streams inter-beat intervals to a local compute node, and derives heart-rate-variability measures per participant and per group in real time. Sessions are stored in Neural Bank™, our session database.

Simultaneous participants
Up to 25 per session with current fleets; larger cohorts by arrangement
Signal
Wrist PPG with inter-beat interval extraction; bench-validated against a Polar H10 ECG reference (mean error under 2 BPM)
Individual measures
rMSSD and related time-domain HRV indices over a 120-beat rolling window
Group measures
Convergence — a proprietary Coherence Score (C_score™), a cross-sectional measure of dispersion across participants at a point in time. A novel operationalisation, patent-pending, built on established foundations: rMSSD as a vagal marker and group HRV coherence as a studied construct.

Synchrony — inter-subject correlation (ISC), computed on a rolling leave-one-out basis. ISC is an established method in the neuroscience literature, published with wrist PPG and with heart rate in shared-stimulus group settings. Our contribution is its application in real time at room scale, not the method itself.
Data handling
Anonymous by design — no names, accounts, or personal identifiers are collected at any point; participants are represented by session-scoped tokens
Deployment
Self-contained node; all capture and real-time computation run locally with no internet dependency during a session. Sessions are stored on the node and synced to Neural Bank™ for reporting and analysis. The node travels to your site.

Current study

In progress

A pre-registered study of group states in an immersive dome environment is currently underway, with a statistical analysis plan finalized before data collection and an independent statistician responsible for the analysis. Co-primary endpoints are convergence (C_score™) and synchrony (ISC), which we treat as distinct constructs rather than interchangeable measures — dispersion at an instant versus co-movement over time. Results will be reported whatever the direction of the findings. Methods documentation is available to collaborating investigators on request.

Working together

What we can provide

  • Instrumented sessions at collaborating venues, including an immersive dome
  • Hardware fleets and on-site technical operation for your protocol
  • De-identified session data under a written data-use agreement
  • Methods documentation to support ethics and IRB submissions
  • Engineering support for study-specific measurement needs

What we are looking for

  • Investigators in psychophysiology, affective and social neuroscience, contemplative science, and music cognition
  • Ethics- or IRB-approved protocols we can support with instrumentation
  • Graduate and doctoral projects needing group-level physiological measurement
  • Institutional collaborators for NSF STTR and NIH SBIR applications
  • Methodological critique of our measures — we would rather be corrected early

Scientific Advisory Board

Our measures and study design are reviewed by advisors with published expertise in the fields our work draws on.

Dr. Cynthia Kerson
PhD, QEEG-D, BCN, BCB, BCB-HRV, Senior Fellow
Program Director, Applied Psychophysiology, Saybrook University

Advises on HRV and biofeedback methodology, our coherence-scoring approach and its validation, research design, and session safety.

Dr. Albert "Skip" Rizzo
PhD, Director of Medical Virtual Reality
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Advises on clinical and technology-assisted behavioural health research, immersive environment design, and translation of measurement into applied settings.

Advisors serve in a personal capacity. Their institutional affiliations are listed for identification only and do not imply institutional endorsement of Luminarsphere™.

How we talk about results

Our participant- and venue-facing materials use wellness language and describe how a session shifted across a measurement window. We do not make clinical or diagnostic claims, and we do not describe our group measures as validated markers of any psychological construct beyond what the data support.

We try to be precise about what is established and what is ours. The signal is validated — our hardware was bench-validated against a clinical-grade ECG reference. ISC is an established method with published use in shared-stimulus group settings; what is novel is our real-time room-scale application of it. C_score™ is our own metric — a patent-pending operationalisation resting on peer-reviewed foundations, but not itself independently validated. Where a finding is early-stage, we say so. Investigators who find our framing overstated anywhere are invited to tell us — that feedback has already changed how we report.

Our methods are reviewed by the Scientific Advisory Board named below. Core measurement methods are covered by a filed U.S. provisional patent; the C_score™ formula is disclosed to collaborating investigators under confidentiality so that methods can be properly reviewed.

Start a conversation

Tell us about your research question and what you would need to measure. We respond to academic inquiries directly, and early-stage conversations are welcome — including ones that conclude the platform is not the right fit.

Email our research team