Adapting Haptic Feedback for Guided Meditation

Technology supporting meditation is a multimillion-dollar market that continues to grow. There is also strong academic interest to understand and improve the impact technology can have for the user experience of practitioners. However, little work investigates how to modulate haptic feedback to accommodate individual requirements without using biomarkers. In collaboration with a cognitive neuroscience laboratory, we investigated interactions between users and a haptic meditation device through two design research studies. Preliminary evaluations with 20 participants showed a preference for digital over analog interfaces for parametrization of the haptic meditation device. 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 interfaces for haptic meditation which allow for parametrization of haptic feedback parameters, as well as a variety of options for the parameterization approach.