At night, a person breathes, and the rhythm of that breathing can tell you a lot about their sleep. But usually, doctors look at the brain's electrical waves — recorded by sensors on the head. New work shows how to reconstruct those waves from breathing alone, without touching the head.

The model acts as a translator from the language of the body to the language of the brain. It takes a breathing recording and turns it into a sequence of simple pieces, just as a musician breaks a melody into notes. Then, from those notes, a full picture of the brain's electrical activity is assembled. The model was trained on recordings from more than 28,000 people, and the reconstruction error was only 7%.

The most interesting part is that the model works even with contactless sensors. Radio waves bounce off the body and pick up breathing, and then the model turns those reflections into a picture of sleep. This paves the way for quiet diagnostics without wires or glued-on electrodes.