In spite of the demonstrated benefits of mindfulness meditation, access to mindfulness training remains limited, due in part to a lack of adequately trained providers, and a lack of access to training programs. Psychometrix Associates plans to develop a virtual computer coach to provide customized, adaptive training in mindfulness meditation techniques. The coach will be based on a widely-used manualized mindfulness training program: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The coach will integrate and enhance two areas of knowledge, research and emerging technologies: relational pedagogical agents and affective computing, to develop an innovative product designed to help students initiate and maintain a mindfulness meditation practice. Specific innovations include: mindfulness training via a virtual coach;enhanced social and affective realism of the coach;and customized feedback provided to the student during training. The coach will initially be intended for use by healthcare providers, but will later be adapted for use by patients, and by consumers. By providing low-cost, easily-accessible training and support necessary for the development and establishment of a mindfulness meditation practice, the virtual coach would provide the benefits of mindfulness meditation to a larger segment of the population. The coach will also be useful as a tool for delivering standardized mindfulness training for researchers conducting empirical studies of the effects and mechanisms of mindfulness. Following an initial desktop/laptop application, the coach would also be available as a web-based service, and for mobile devices. Under the proposed Phase I study, we will focus on the following objectives. Develop the Mindfulness Training Coach prototype, by integrating an existing conversational coaching agent with an existing affective agent architecture, to provide engaging coaching and customized feedback, tuned to the student's dynamic emotional state and progress in the training. Develop content for the coach prototype, by adapting the existing MBSR training materials. Obtain feedback regarding the coach's usability from potential users and experts, by conducting concurrent usability evaluation during development. Assess the coach's effectiveness in training mindfulness meditation practice via a 4-week pilot study. Use resulting data to inform the design of a full-scope coach under a Phase II. A successful development of the proposed virtual coach would advance the state-of-the-art in affect-adaptive coaching for health behavior and affective relational agents in general, and would produce a technology that could have significant benefits for public health, and health-related research.
The proposed virtual coach for mindfulness training would provide a low-cost, easily-accessible tool to provide the training and support necessary for the development and establishment of a mindfulness meditation practice. Given the demonstrated benefits associated with a regular practice of mindfulness, increased access to these techniques could result in significant improvements in public health, and associated cost savings.
| Hudlicka, Eva (2013) Virtual training and coaching of health behavior: example from mindfulness meditation training. Patient Educ Couns 92:160-6 |
