Our motivations for this work stem from our interest in the mind-body practice of meditation.
The regular practice of meditation has shown benefits for mental and physical wellbeing.
For instance, improving emotion regulation skills through the development of interoceptive awareness, which is fully attending to bodily sensations and letting these guide your experience.
Most HCI technologies for meditation aim to support an inwards focus towards bodily sensations.
In those cases, however, the main focus of attention is taken away from the body.
As a common approach is mapping brain activity data and meditation states into visual and aural interfaces.
For instance, meditation states are usually represented on a vertical axis, with being mindful is generally high (for example, position, or pitch) and mind wandering is low.
However, the design of such mappings of bodily experiences for meditation has been limitedly described.
The framework and concepts presented in the paper, draw from the bodies of work of phenomenology as well as on linguistic analysis of metaphors.
We focused on the main metaphors used in traditional meditation to describe the different states, as well as the bodily sensations associated with them.
This theory allowed us to develop the framework, which was also informed by a review of meditation technologies in HCI.
We looked at the metaphors used in these systems, and how they were conveyed in different creative mappings of brain activity data.
We have developed and revised the framework through an exploratory study comparing two distinct feedback modalities: aural with Muse and thermal with the WarmMind prototype
for metaphor-based mappings of three key meditation states: being mindful, mind-wandering, and the changes between them.
For the aural modality in our study, we have purposefully chosen Muse: an increasingly popular commercial brain activity application providing nature-inspired soundscapes in real-time to map and guide one’s meditation experience.
For the thermal modality, we designed and implemented the WarmMind prototype which is made up of four heatpads attached to the skin, from the chest to the belly.
Drawing from our previous study exploring the bodily sensations associated with each meditation state and how these can inform the design of more holistic meditation technologies, we explored the creation of movement and warmth metaphors on the upper body with heat following a somaesthetic design approach.
This exploration was key to design the thermal patterns for meditation, as this is a novel material and modality of feedback for meditation technologies.
The mapping of WarmMind’s on-body haptic feedback differs from Muse’s aural feedback in three important ways:
First, WarmMind targets bodily internal senses by recreating bodily sensations, as identified in our previous work.
Second, it provides discrete feedback with patterns that activate when a change of state is sensed.
And finally, the mapping is more abstract and ambiguous as it uses warmth and movement-based metaphors on the upper body, a key body part for meditation as we identified in our previous study.
The patterns are composed of four 6-second actuations of one ore more heatpads at a time, see the orange blobs in the image, with a 4 second break after each, to convey the movement metaphors by allowing the heat to dissipate between actuations.
These findings informed the development of our proposed framework which has three main design tensions that should be considered when designing meditation systems:
- Rich to subtle sensory stimulation
- Continuous to discrete feedback of meditation states
-Familiar to ambiguous metaphorical mapping
For instance, we found that rich stimulus, continuous feedback and familiar metaphorical mappings such as Muse’s soundscape support discoverability of meditation states but hinder attention regulation, as it was too cognitively demanding.
In contrast, the subtle stimulation, discrete feedback, and ambiguous metaphorical mappings of WarmMind supported attention regulation but the rather vague feedback was more difficult to understand.
This may be a good trade-off as it prevented self-judgemental attitude, which Muse reinforced, and goes against meditation principles.
We argue that this framework, informed by our empirical findings, phenomenology and embodied metaphors of meditation, can inform the design of new technologies for meditation mapping bodily experiences onto interface modality and content.
We also propose the concept of interoceptive interaction which allows to facilitate paying attention to bodily sensations by tapping on the interoceptive awareness sense, as the feedback provided is perceived as coming from the body instead of, and despite, being provided by an external interface.
We illustrate this concept with the WarmMind prototype, in which:
-the body acts as the input and the output interface, by sensing the brain activity and actuation on a on-body interface
-using warmth-based feedback patterns to guide the experience, which was perceived by most participants as part of their bodily experience
-that have been designed based on contemporary theory of metaphors in meditation