Design a mobile-based application that lets you handle meeting proceedings comprehensively and effectively solving the issue of recording meetings while tackling all the things that one might want to do during or after a meeting.

Working Professionals attending meetings regularly.

1.) Interviews.

1.) Validate Assumptions
2.) Find and prioritize needs
3.) Discover more problems

I called a few of my friends who interned with various companies and startups to get more insights into the problem.

I did affinity mapping to empathize more with the users and to find common grey areas to solve for.

Based on these findings, I went ahead and created the user personas.

To relate to the life of personas, I created storyboards for each of them.

I jot down points and information and refer to it every time I make a design decision. Before starting to design, I played around with different Note-taking, Productivity, and To-do apps (Notion, Google Keep, Trello, Slack) to understand the design.

Lo-fi wireframes to redefine the sketches in order to make the idea more concrete.

I went ahead with green as my main color because it has calming effects. I used Figma to design app screens.

Let people drive conversations- During the telephonic interviews, I asked open-ended questions to get to the pain points and let the user drive the conversations. If we’re looking for some insight into how users think about a problem, open questions always give us a lot more detail.

HTC Vive (VR headset) | Unity | Muse Band 2 (EEG Headset) | Shimmer GSR

I studied tons of research articles to gain insights about the intersection of HCI and neuroscience fields. I also read blogs, websites, and news articles throughout my internship period to stay up to date with the latest trends.

Meditation practices have traditionally been used to promote relaxation and wellbeing; they have recently gained more significance among the different communities with the goal of healthy living.

Chakra healing is an ancient meditation practice from the Buddhist Nalanda traditions (600–300 BCE). A chakra healing session typically deals with balancing the energies of the chakras, the seven energy centers of the human body through mind relaxation, contemplation and breath control. Through the VR experience, we aimed to support these different elements through technology, to make them easier for novice users.

As part of the experience, the user engaged in a 25-minute chakra healing session in VR; as an exploration, the experience was designed on basis of a guided session popular on Youtube (this one). He was asked to sit cross-legged, he found himself looking at his virtual avatar sitting in the same posture. Microsoft Kinect 2 device was used to track his body movements and accordingly adjust the virtual body. During the guided session, the guide asked him to focus his awareness on the body regions corresponding to the seven chakras, to visualize their energies, to cure them through conscious thought (elicited through the guide’s speech) and breath control. As he engaged in this process, he saw the seven chakras appear in his virtual body, their intensity increasing with every breath that he inhaled; their auras becoming cleaner over time. Visualizing the specific dynamics of the different chakras in the virtual body, the user felt them in his physical body. The user’s attention was critical to enable this experience and was manifested as feedback in the visual intensity of the virtual body; the body became brighter as the attention increased, became dull when the user became distracted by everyday thoughts.

The chakra system is the Indic central nervous system as defined so in Buddhist and Hindu tantra traditions. The seven chakras arranged across our upper body along the spine, from the pelvic bone to the crown of the head influence our experiences. The chakra healing process is targeted at affecting these body systems through conscious thought. The mental and physical elements interact through bimodal causation (mind affects the body and vice-versa) at the interface of mental states and energy patterns.

There is growing agreement in the neuroscience community to support the existence of both embodied experience and bimodal causation, hence strengthening the principles behind chakra healing. This comes in addition to growing empirical evidence regarding the positive effects of meditation practices in general. Given these developments, such explorations of trying to enable chakra healing through modern technology are of great interest; to expanding the outreach of the practice and for scientific investigation.

BOI’s put the user into a perceptual state of embodying a virtual avatar, creating the illusion that the body is “mine.” Such an illusion has been studied to induce strong cognitive and behavioral effects like altering the user’s perception of his physical body or to make him empathetic towards other people. We used the body ownership illusion to provide the user with an interoceptive body map for the sensations elicited during the guided meditation process. We hypothesize that the BOI and the interoception processes mutually strengthened one another.

Guided imagery is a technique used in alternative medicine wherein the patients are exposed to visuals of their corrected self like disease-free, healed skin; the conflict between what the patients see and what they feel has been observed to help cure the condition. Similarly, with this experience, the expectation is that viewing the chakras in the virtual body might assist the user in feeling them in his physical body. Synchronous visual and interoceptive stimuli might work together to strengthen the user’s BOI.

User’s mindfulness and attention play a significant role in enabling the expected experience. Typically, novices with no meditation experience face difficulty in keeping their heads clear, their attention constantly diverting to everyday thoughts. Hence we used the attention retention theory (ART) to assist them in this process. Specifically, we sensed the user’s attention using Muse 2 EEG device and utilized it to control the illumination of the virtual body.

The guided meditation audio plays an important role in tying the experience together for the user. As per the Nalanda traditions, the seven chakras represent different areas of our life like relationships, higher-order thinking, and creativity. The guide talks about these associations to elicit specific mental states in the user; Parallelly, he asks the user to focus on the body sensations corresponding to the chakras, hence triggering the mind-body connection. Second, to this, the audio from a human actor helps establish the user’s trust on the visualizations in the virtual body, and on the whole intervention in general.

We tested this experience with 12 participants: all being college students in the age group 18–25 years, 7 males and 5 females. We conducted qualitative interviews to gauge early perceptions regarding different design features like body ownership, interoception, attention biofeedback, and audio guidance. Overall, all participants liked the experience and found it to be relaxing; reports on other attributes like being able to feel the chakras varied. While some participants were able to sense some or all of the chakras in their bodies, some did not, and few felt sleepy. As per expectation, those who did feel the chakras developed a stronger BOI, while the others reported on viewing the dynamics in the virtual body “as a movie.” Breath synchronization with the ball in the virtual body was also reported to assist embodiment. Most participants reported on being able to follow the guided audio; One participant highlighted its importance during the interview saying “its important to not lose the audio if it is lost the connection would break.” Another participant described his experience by saying “I became completely devoted to him; what he was saying I was able to feel.”

We attribute the differences observed in the user study to participants’ varying meditation abilities and to the limitations of the study design. Not all participants could maintain the same level of mindfulness during the session which could have limited their interoception of the body sensations. Many participants experienced backache while sitting in the cross-legged pose for this long while few became uncomfortable due to the heavyweight of the HMD. Moreover, the user studies were conducted all through the day as per the availability of the participants and researchers; time of the day might have also affected participants’ ability to meditate.

In conclusion, we consider this to be an early effort to explore a paradigm that can prove to be very effective. Beyond the limitations, the study uncovered many interesting insights that can help develop future iterations of this experience, and can provide directions for further scientific investigation in this area.

1.) A perception theory in mind-body medicine: guided imagery and mindful meditation as cross-modal adaptation.
2.) Defining embodied cognition: The problem of situatedness
3.) Over my fake body: body ownership illusions for studying the multisensory basis of own-body perception
4.) The subtle body: an interoceptive map of central nervous system function and meditative mind-brain-body integration.
5.) Meditation research, past, present, and future: perspectives from the Nalanda contemplative science tradition.
6.) Movement-based embodied contemplative practices: definitions and paradigms
7.) A Framework for Interactive Mindfulness Meditation Using Attention-Regulation Process

HTC Vive (VR headset) | Unity | Muse Band 2 (EEG Headset) | Shimmer GSR

I studied tons of research articles to gain insights about the intersection of HCI and neuroscience fields. I also read blogs, websites, and news articles throughout my internship period to stay up to date with the latest trends.

Interoception refers to the ability of the human body to perceive sensations from inside itself. Much of this perception remains unconscious; what becomes conscious, i.e., interoceptive awareness involves the processing of inner sensations so that they become available to conscious awareness. For instance, we can get aware of our breathing when mindful. This interoceptive awareness plays a critical role in emotion regulation: our ability to become aware of internal sensations related to our affective states allows us to self regulate our emotions; lack of this awareness leads to emotional disorders. In the past, researchers have developed therapeutic approaches to increase interoceptive awareness; patients are taught to become mindful of the sensations felt in different parts of their body through techniques like body scanning.

The user stood in a virtual reality environment, saw his virtual body in a third-person perspective. The virtual body followed the user’s body movements as tracked by a Microsoft Kinect to establish perceived embodiment. Next, the user saw a short 8 minutes horror movie played on a two-dimensional screen within VR; horror has been called a body genre due to the bodily sensations that it elicits and hence fits well within the scope of our exploration. While the user watched the movie, the virtual body displayed visualizations corresponding to those bodily sensations as experienced by the user; We expected this display to make the user conscious about the fear sensations and hence assist to regulate them. The experience was tested with 8 participants (4 males, 4 females). The experiments were conducted during day time after taking informed consent from all the participants.

The virtual avatar displayed visualizations of the fear emotion that the users felt within themselves as they watched the movie. The place of the visualizations within the body was decided by referring to the Bodily maps of emotions as presented by Nummenmaa et al. in their paper. The researchers used extensive self-reports from 701 participants to define the maps of where different emotions were felt; fear was observed to be felt primarily in the chest and the abdomen region. Next, we tuned the intensity of the visualization with the participant’s arousal as observed from the galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor, and with the dynamics of the horror movie itself.

Galvanic skin response or skin conductivity as an approach for arousal measurement offers a poor temporal resolution — the response typically comes 3–5 seconds later than the presented stimuli. Hence, it cannot be used to quantify conditioned or startle responses in the user for interoceptive display. The intensity of the bodily visualizations (w.r.t these responses) was manually tuned by the researchers as per the trajectory of the movie; taking into account the sudden startle moments, playback of scary music, etc. The resultant peaks in intensity were then moderated with GSR drop, used as an index of psychological fear induced in the participant. Amount of psychological fear can depend on a variety of participant-specific factors like socio-cultural contexts, what s/he is afraid of and what doesn’t scare him/her, motivation, attention, etc. Some participants can feel more scared than others during the movie. Moderating with GSR drop took care of these factors.

We conducted qualitative interviews with the participants to gather their perceptions regarding the experience. Participants were given an initial brief: that they would watch a horror movie and the virtual body would display the affective sensations that they feel as detected by the (GSR) sensor that they had worn on their hand. They were not informed regarding the event-based tuning done by the researchers. 7 out of 8 participants felt that the visualizations in the virtual body were in synchronization with the sensations that they had felt. They used phrases like “I was able to see my response,” or “my feelings were shown in the avatar,” to describe their experience. One participant wondered if the visualizations were actually connected to the music in the video rather than his emotions.

In the beginning of the video as the story was picking up, participants reported on thinking consciously about their emotions (as displayed on the virtual avatar,) like what were they thinking that was making them scared, etc. 3 participants reported on trying to reduce the fear by not thinking too much about the story or through deep breathing; two of them felt that he was able to achieve that. As the story picked up-tempo this conscious reflection stopped. The participants reported on seeing the virtual body after moments of startle response or when they became too scared.

Apart from conscious regulation that some participants reported on, we seek to investigate if just looking at the visualizations in the virtual body (like after moments of startle responses) would reduce fear through unconscious processing; this would need to be checked through objective measures like GSR or heart rate. Strong body ownership of the virtual avatar would be necessary to achieve this. Currently, the ownership was elicited through visual-kinesthetic mapping wherein the motion of the avatar was mapped to the user’s movements. This approach, however, is more effective if the user moves his body continuously which didn’t necessarily happen while watching the video. Hence, this aspect remains to be worked on in future design iterations. Designing a “universal” interoceptive body mirror would require a sophisticated body imaging machinery which probably hasn’t been invented yet. The technique used in this project worked very well in the specific scenario of watching a horror movie. The design of visualizations based on the crowdsourced interoception maps and user-specific tweaking through GSR, was perceived to be similar to the actual bodily experience by the participants.

1.) Interoceptive Awareness Skills for Emotion Regulation: Theory and Approach of Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT)
2.) How Do You Feel?An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self
3.) Bodily maps of emotions
4.) Fear: A Psychophysiological Study of Horror Film Viewing
5.) Screams on Screens: Paradigms of Horror
6.) Full-Body Ownership Illusion Can Change Our Emotion