TANGAEON: Tangible Interaction to Support People in a Mindfulness Practice

ABSTRACT

Recently, Tangible and Embodied Interaction (TEI) approaches to support people in mindfulness practices have been proposed in the literature, but they have scarcely explored the use of real natural elements in the interaction. In this article, we first present TANGAEON, a TEI system that augments the AEON mindfulness mobile app with an interactive, water-filled glass container. Second, we evaluate TANGAEON by contrasting it with two traditional mindfulness techniques and with AEON. TANGAEON obtained better results in terms of achieved mindfulness, perceived level of difficulty, and degree of pleasantness than the two traditional techniques. Moreover, considering all techniques, participants achieved the highest level of mindfulness with TANGAEON, and rated it as the most pleasant and preferred approach to practice. These results suggest that the use of TEI based on a natural element can offer a novel and effective way to help people approach and practice mindfulness, and to augment existing mindfulness apps.

Notes

¹ Although it is common in the HCI literature to refer to users that are new to a task with the term “novice”, in this article we use the term “naive” to indicate people with no or minimal experience with meditation, consistently with the research literature on meditation, see e.g. Moore and Malinowski (2009), Soler et al. (2014), and Thompson and Waltz (2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Vianello

Andrea Vianello is a design researcher and UX designer at Siili Solutions, Helsinki, Finland. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Aalto University, Finland. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Udine, Italy, where he worked in the HCI Lab.

Luca Chittaro

Luca Chittaro is full professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics of the University of Udine, Italy, where he heads the HCI Lab (http://hcilab.uniud.it). He has authored or co-authored over 190 international publications, and he is an ACM Distinguished Speaker.

Assunta Matassa

Assunta Matassa is currently a PM for IoT and Big Data projects at Enel Italia. In January 2017, she received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Torino, Italy, where she worked in the HCI Group. She studied the implications of IoTs to interact with/in spaces exploiting the capabilities of human body.