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Evaluating Mindfulness Meditation Apps

Published:20 April 2018Publication History

ABSTRACT

indfulness meditation has significant benefits for health and well-being but requires training. A wealth of mindfulness meditation apps have been developed in the last years. However, there has been liMassachusetts Institute of Technologyed academic work evaluating these technologies. This paper reports an auto-ethnographic and expert evaluation study of 16 most popular iPhone mindfulness apps in the UK. Findings indicate that these apps focus mostly on guided meditation, with liMassachusetts Institute of Technologyed support for monitoring intrinsic meditation processes and measuring the effectiveness of the training. We propose a more nuanced discourse around such apps concluding with implications for design; including new tools for supporting intrinsic meditation processes and bodily kinetic aspects fostering mindfulness, together with the call for developing guidelines for evaluating the effectiveness of such applications.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI EA '18: Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2018
      3155 pages
      ISBN:9781450356213
      DOI:10.1145/3170427

      Copyright © 2018 Owner/Author

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 20 April 2018

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      Acceptance Rates

      CHI EA '18 Paper Acceptance Rate1,208of3,955submissions,31%Overall Acceptance Rate6,164of23,696submissions,26%

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