Mindfulness meditation apps are widely available but have received little academic evaluation. An auto-ethnographic and expert evaluation of the 16 most popular iPhone mindfulness apps in the UK found that they primarily offer guided meditation, with limited support for monitoring internal meditation processes or measuring training effectiveness. The authors call for a more nuanced discussion about these apps and suggest design improvements, including tools that support intrinsic meditation processes and bodily kinetic aspects that foster mindfulness, as well as guidelines for evaluating app effectiveness.
Meditation technologies often use visual or sound metaphors to represent mental states, but these external modalities can pull attention away from the body. This paper introduces interoceptive interaction, using embodied metaphor theory to design mappings to the internal sense of thermoception. The authors built WarmMind, an on-body interface with heat actuators, and tested it with 10 participants, comparing thermal metaphors to the soundscape metaphors of the Muse meditation app. Findings show a tension: soundscape metaphors are highly discoverable but hinder attention regulation, while ambiguous thermal metaphors feel as if they come from the body and support attention regulation. The authors discuss qualities of embodied metaphors and propose a framework for designing metaphorical mappings in meditation technologies.