The Complete Guide

How to Measure Energy in the Human Body

From calories and joules to biophotons and biofield imaging — every method science has developed to quantify the energy flowing through you.

In This Guide

1. What Does "Energy" Actually Mean in the Body?
2. Metabolic Energy: Calories, Joules, and Calorimetry
3. Electrical Energy: EEG, ECG, and EMG
4. Thermal Energy: Infrared Thermography
5. Heart Rate Variability (HRV): The Autonomic Window
6. Biophotonic Energy: The Light Your Cells Emit
7. Electro-Photonic Imaging (GDV): Mapping the Biofield
8. The WHO's Recognition: Energy Medicine Goes Mainstream
9. Side-by-Side: Every Method Compared
10. How to Get Started

In physics, energy is the capacity to do work — measured in joules. In the body, that definition fractures into multiple parallel systems, each operating at a different scale and each requiring its own measurement approach.

Understanding which type of energy you want to measure is the first step to choosing the right tool. A fitness tracker measures metabolic output. An EEG measures brain electricity. A GDV camera — like the Bio-Well device — measures the photonic emissions from your fingertips to create a map of your entire biofield.

Let's examine each method in turn.

The most familiar form of body energy is metabolic — the chemical energy produced when cells convert food into adenosine triphosphate (ATP). This is what people mean when they say they feel "energized" or "drained."

How it's measured: Indirect calorimetry calculates energy expenditure by measuring the volume of oxygen consumed and carbon dioxide exhaled. Direct calorimetry — placing a person in a sealed, insulated chamber — measures the actual heat they produce. Both are gold standards in exercise physiology and clinical nutrition.

What it tells you: How many calories your body is burning and whether your metabolism favors fats or carbohydrates as fuel. It's critical for athletic training and clinical nutrition.

What it misses: Metabolic measurement says nothing about your nervous system state, emotional balance, organ-level energy distribution, or biofield coherence. You can burn 2,000 calories and still feel completely depleted — because metabolic energy is only one layer.

Your body runs on electricity. Neurons fire at up to 100 millivolts. Your heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field of any organ — measurable several feet from the body. Every muscle contraction is an electrical event.

What these miss: Electrical measurements are organ- or system-specific. An EEG tells you about brain states but nothing about digestive energy. An ECG maps the heart but not the liver. None of them capture the integrated, whole-body energy picture — which is precisely what biophotonic methods aim to do.

Every cell in your body radiates heat in the infrared spectrum. Infrared thermography cameras detect these emissions to produce thermal maps of the body surface, revealing areas of abnormal blood flow, inflammation, or metabolic activity.

Clinical applications include breast cancer screening adjuncts, musculoskeletal injury assessment, and vascular disorder detection. It's entirely passive and non-invasive — the camera simply reads the infrared radiation your body naturally emits.

Limitation: Thermography is a surface measurement. It cannot assess deep organ function, chakra alignment, meridian flow, or the overall coherence of your biofield. It captures heat — not light.

HRV measures the variation in time between consecutive heartbeats. Counter-intuitively, more variation is healthier — it indicates a flexible, responsive autonomic nervous system that can shift between sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) states.

This GDV-HRV correlation is important because it means that Bio-Well's energy scan captures information that overlaps with — and extends beyond — what HRV alone can tell you. HRV gives you the autonomic component; GDV gives you the full energetic picture.

This is where energy measurement moves into territory most people have never encountered. Every living cell in your body emits ultra-weak photons — light particles in the 200–800 nanometer range. These are not metaphorical. They are physically measurable electromagnetic radiation, detected by photomultiplier tubes sensitive enough to count individual photons.

German biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp (1938–2018) first coined the term "biophoton" in 1984 to describe photons of non-thermal origin in the UV-visible spectrum emitted by biological systems. His research at the International Institute of Biophysics in Neuss, Germany — a network of 19 research groups across 13 countries — demonstrated that biophoton emission is correlated with cellular health, metabolic function, and intercellular communication.

A key finding: healthy cells emit more coherent biophotons than diseased cells. Coherence here means the photons are synchronized — their wave patterns align. When coherence drops, it signals cellular stress, DNA damage, or metabolic disruption. This finding opened the door to using photon emission as a diagnostic indicator.

A comprehensive 2024 review in PMC confirmed that biophoton research has advanced significantly since Popp's era, noting that biophotons are now recognized as important mediators of cellular communication, metabolic regulation, and neural signaling — and that the detection technology continues to improve rapidly.

Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) — also called Electro-Photonic Imaging (EPI) — is the technology that bridges biophoton science with practical, clinical energy assessment. Developed in 1995 by Professor Konstantin Korotkov, PhD, a physicist at Saint Petersburg State University (now Saint Petersburg Federal University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics), GDV applies a brief, controlled high-voltage electromagnetic pulse to the fingertips.

The electrical pulse causes photo-electron emission — photons and electrons cascade from the fingertip, amplified in a gas discharge around the electrode, and captured by a CCD camera. The resulting image is then processed by Bio-Well's software, which maps the emission patterns to specific organs and body systems via the meridian connections established in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and validated through decades of clinical studies.

With over 400 academic publications referencing GDV/EPI technology and studies conducted at institutions including Jackson State University, the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, UCLA's Center for Health Sciences, and the University of Arizona's Laboratory for Advances in Human Consciousness and Health, the evidence base continues to grow.

On January 1, 2022, the World Health Organization's 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) officially came into effect. For the first time in the history of global health standards, it includes Chapter 26: "Supplementary Chapter Traditional Medicine Conditions — Module 1" — codifying diagnostic categories from traditional Chinese medicine including energy patterns, meridian-based diagnoses, and conditions related to energy flow.

This is significant because it means that energy-based diagnostic concepts — including the meridian system that Bio-Well uses to map fingertip emissions to organs — are now part of the internationally recognized medical classification framework used in over 180 countries.

Traditional medicine is practiced in various forms across more than 180 countries. The ICD-11 inclusion enables standardized counting, comparing, and monitoring of traditional medicine encounters — a prerequisite for the evidence-based integration of energy medicine into global healthcare systems.

Note: No single method replaces the others. The most comprehensive approach combines methods — for example, pairing HRV monitoring with Bio-Well's GDV scan, as the published correlation study suggests these capture complementary dimensions of the same underlying energy state.

If you're curious about measuring your energy field, you have two paths:

Sources Cited in This Article

1. Popp, F.A. "Properties of biophotons and their theoretical implications." Indian J Exp Biol. 2003;41(5):391-402. PMID: 15244259.
2. Popp, F.A., Gu, Q., Li, K.H. "Biophoton emission: experimental background and theoretical approaches." Modern Physics Letters B. 1994;8(21-22):1269-1296. DOI: 10.1142/S0217984994001266.
3. Korotkov, K. "Review of EPI papers on medicine and psychophysiology published in 2008–2018." Int J Complement Alt Med. 2018;11(6). DOI: 10.15406/ijcam.2018.11.00417.
4. Glenn, R. "A Correlation Between GDV and HRV Measures: A New Measure of Wellbeing." New Venture Technologies / Estee Lauder Companies, 2004. Published via IUMAB.
5. Aung, S.K.H. et al. "Incorporation of complementary and traditional medicine in ICD-11." BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2022;22(Suppl 6):381. PMID: 35773641.
6. World Health Organization. "Traditional Medicine" FAQ. who.int/standards/classifications/frequently-asked-questions/traditional-medicine.
7. "Bio-electrographic Method for Preventive Health Care." Jackson State University, 2009. Published via IUMAB.
8. "Electro-Photonic Emission Analysis in Patients with COPD." Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, 2024. Published via IUMAB.
9. "Engineering Approach to Identifying Patients with Colon Tumors on the Basis of EPI Data." Open Biomedical Engineering Journal, 2016.
10. "Causal Relationships Between GDV Parameters and Leukocytogram." J Education, Health and Sport, 2021.
11. "Psychophysiological Correlates of Athletic Success in Athletes Training for the Olympics." Human Physiology, 31, 2005.
12. "Correlation of Electrophotonic Imaging Parameters With Fasting Blood Sugar." J Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine, 2016.
13. Zarkeshian, P. et al. "Ultra weak photon emission — a brief review." PMC, 2024. PMC10899412.

Up Next in This Series

What Is a GDV Camera? The Science of Gas Discharge Visualization

From Nikola Tesla's 1891 experiments to Bio-Well 3.0 — the complete history of the technology that lets you see energy.