A user-centered design approach for crafting personalized guided meditation

Interest in technology supporting meditation continues to grow commercially and academically. Commonly, these approaches look at how audio-visual feedback based on physiological indicators can help induce a state of meditation. Haptic feedback is now seen as a promising alternative to audio-visual stimuli for meditation. However, as yet, little work has investigated how to personalize haptic feedback or how to combine it with other feedback modalities, notably audio-visual stimuli. In collaboration with a cognitive neuroscience laboratory, we investigated interactions between users and a haptic meditation device through three design research studies. Preparatory evaluations with 20 participants showed a preference for digital over analog interfaces for parametrization of the haptic meditation device. Based on these preliminary results, we developed a digital interface based on three scenarios of use. Extensive evaluations with 29 participants revealed high usability and aesthetic scores while highlighting different perceived user experience qualities. The final study with 21 participants found that the hedonic and pragmatic preferences depend on both the experience of a user and their age. The work gives new insights into designing multimodal interfaces for meditation which allow for parametrization of haptic feedback parameters, as well as a variety of options for the parameterization approach.