Technologically Assisted Mindfulness Meditation for Older Adults

Mindfulness meditation has recently received considerable interest in clinical and in broader contexts for its mental health and cognitive benefits. It has been proposed that giving people feedback about their meditation relevant brain activity during or after meditation can help people learn this difficult skill, and initial work looks promising, but there are a number of unanswered questions. Additionally, it may be difficult for older adults to learn it due to age-related cognitive changes. We propose to investigate the brain activity of older adults during mindfulness meditation as part of designing tools to help them learn mindfulness and to clarify the issues they face. Additionally, older adults face many issues learning and using technology, and we propose to understand the usability issues they face with existing technologies that make use of brain activity. TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Cosmin Munteanu

Student:

Simon Cook

Partner:

InteraXon

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

Program: