Understanding and Designing for the First-Person Experience of Walking and Sitting Mindfulness Meditation Facilitated by EEG Modulated Interactive Soundscapes

Abstract

An established way for people to learn coping strategies to deal with everyday stress is mindfulness meditation. Current technologies that incorporate the teachings of mindfulness meditation often use realtime, corrective feedback models to help people understand when they are in a mindfulness state. Interactive soundscapes modulated by electroencephalogram (EEG) data offer promising opportunities to support attentional focus and meta-awareness during meditation. However, existing research often relies on quantitative survey data and ignores collecting first-person perspectives of the moment-by-moment, lived experience during the practice.

The thesis explores the following research questions: • What descriptive models of first-person experience of sitting and walking meditation are useful for technology design? • How can interactive soundscapes using EEG data foster a quality of experience that supports attentional focus and meta-awareness? • What design guidelines are useful to design interactive soundscapes that effectively support the practice of mindfulness in sitting and walking meditation?

Following a somatic experience design research process, two case studies explored the design of prototype technologies for a sitting breathing exercise and a slow walking exercise for mindfulness meditation. The interactive prototypes apply a strategy of gently guiding and supporting the user’s in-the-moment experience of practising meditation through a repetitive rhythmic soundscape that responds to the user’s brainwave activity collected from the Muse EEG Headset.

The sitting meditation prototype was developed using iterative design method with 20 participants and concluded with a month-long study where 6 participants practiced meditation at home. The walking meditation case study consisted of 6 workshops to iteratively design the experience with 6 to 10 participants in each workshop.

Key contributions from the research include two design case studies and interactive soundscape prototypes to support sitting and walking meditation, a descriptive model for sitting and walking meditation, design guidelines for interactive soundscapes to support mindfulness meditation, and a research toolkit for collecting first-person data of mind-body-based lived experiences.