Using traditional mandala drawing and brain monitoring technology to promote mindfulness

A user colors a digital mandala using a stylus on the main display. An EEG headset monitors brain signals and a peripheral display, in the form of an artists' palette, generates new colors based on the EEG data. Credit: Dr Claudia Dauden Roquet

Combining centuries-old traditional mandala coloring with cutting-edge computing and brain-sensing technologies could lead to new ways of helping people achieve mindfulness. Mandalas are geometric configurations of shapes that have their origins in Buddhist traditions. The coloring of mandala shapes is increasingly popular as a way for people to attempt 'mindfulness', a way of being present in the moment, and which has been associated with helping people to improve their mental health and wellbeing.

Lancaster University's human-computer interaction researchers have created a novel prototype that can monitor people's brain activity while they color mandalas and generate real-time feedback on a peripheral display to reflect levels of awareness. The researchers, who specialize in thinking about how new computing technologies can be designed to help people believe that systems like these could be developed to aid in the learning and training of focused attention mindfulness techniques, as well as to assist people in dealing with stress, depression, and other affective health disorders.

The researchers conducted interviews with experienced mandala practitioners to learn about the unique properties of mandala coloring and how they may be utilized to attain mindfulness and built the prototype on their findings. The Anima prototype includes a tablet device for users to color mandala forms, a wearable EEG headgear that analyzes wearers' brain signals, and a second display in the shape of an artist's palette that is placed in the user's peripheral vision.

When users paint a digital mandala on the primary display with a pen, the EEG headgear analyzes their brain waves and measures their degrees of mindfulness. The readings are then displayed on the peripheral display as fresh extra colors, depending on the four colors chosen by the user at the outset, but with variations in saturation and brightness. More subdued colors reflected moments of awareness, whereas brighter colors suggested periods when the user lost concentration or got distracted. AffecTech: Personal Technologies for Affective Health, an Innovative Training Network financed by the European Union's Horizon2020 People Program under Marie Skodowska-Curie, supported the research, which was conducted by Professor Corina Sas of Lancaster University's School of Computing and Communications.

According to Professor Sas, making sense of EEG data and effectively capturing it via design is a difficult task. It was critical that the colors on the peripheral display, which was disconnected from the main screen, be ambiguous and nuanced in order to allow users to openly monitor their awareness while not distracting their focus from the coloring itself. The findings of the study point to two essential and previously unknown tasks of the mandala: collecting emotional memories and reflecting on them. Technology has the potential to assist both of these tasks in ways that paper-based mandalas do not. Participants expressed a desire to re-engage with their finished mandalas during the reflection stage, and even to recolor them, frequently in more positive hues, after they had reflected and their mental status had changed. This would be made more practicable by technological advancements.

According to Dominic Potts, a Ph.D. student at Lancaster University and co-author, people can use these kinds of technologies to help improve their mandala coloring as a focused attention mindfulness practice by understanding how Anima provides feedback and reflecting on their coloring session using the data provided by the prototype.

According to the study, many people who use mandala coloring for mindfulness and mental health want to save their finished mandalas and look back at them to reflect on how they felt at the time they colored them. This is another area where technology might be beneficial.

The study provided fresh knowledge in a number of other areas, which might lead to the creation of new mindfulness technologies.

According to Dr. Claudia Dauden Roquet, the study's principal author, "display decoupling with the use of near periphery for real-time monitoring of the activity on the main display is an essential design idea that might be advantageous for mindfulness technologies." Furthermore, little attention has been paid to human-computer interaction research to mindfulness practices that demand fine motor abilities, such as coloring detailed details on mandalas or meditation beads. Our findings provide new insight into these regions, which may also serve as inspiration for new kinds of mindfulness technology.

This may be expanded to the creation of peripheral visual feedback for various sorts of technology that monitor mindfulness training on the main display. These may be bracelets with real-time graphics displayed in random sequence as a subtle signal of one's mindfulness level, or colors embedded in items like illuminated mouse pads.

The findings are detailed in the publication "Exploring Anima: a brain-computer interface for the peripheral materialization of mindfulness states during mandala coloring," which was published in the journal Taylor & Francis Human-Computer Interaction. Dr. Claudia Dauden Roquet, previously at Lancaster University and currently at Kings College London, Professor Corina Sas, and Lancaster University Ph.D. student Dominic Potts are the study's authors.

Journal Information: Claudia Daudén Roquet et al, Exploring Anima: a brain–computer interface for peripheral materialization of mindfulness states during mandala coloring, Human–Computer Interaction (2021). DOI: 10.1080/07370024.2021.1968864