Dauden Roquet, Claudia and Sas, Corina (2018) Evaluating Mindfulness Meditation Apps. In: CHI EA '18 Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York. ISBN 9781450356213
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Abstract
Mindfulness 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 limited academic work evaluating these technologies. This paper reports an auto-ethnographic and expert evaluation study of 16 most popular iPhone mindfulness apps. Findings indicate that these apps focus mostly on guided meditation with limited 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.