MindfulWatch: A Smartwatch-Based System For Real-Time Respiration Monitoring During Meditation

With a wealth of scientifically proven health benefits, meditation was enjoyed by about 18 million people in the U.S. alone, as of 2012. Yet, there remains a stunning lack of convenient tools for promoting long-term and effective meditation practice. In this paper, we present MindfulWatch, a practical smartwatch-based sensing system that monitors respiration in real-time during meditation -- offering essential biosignals that can potentially be used to empower various future applications such as tracking changes in breathing pattern, offering real-time guidance, and providing an accurate bio-marker for meditation research. To this end, MindfulWatch is designed to be convenient for everyday use with no training required. Operating solely on a smartwatch, MindfulWatch can immediately reach the growing population of smartwatch users, making it ideal for longitudinal data collection for meditation studies. Specifically, it utilizes motion sensors to sense the subtle “micro” wrist rotation (0.01 rad/s) induced by respiration. To accurately capture breathing, we developed a novel self-adaptive model that tracks changes in both breathing pattern and meditation posture over time. MindfulWatch was evaluated based on data from 36 real-world meditation sessions (8.7 hours, 11 subjects). The results suggest that MindfulWatch offers reliable real-time respiratory timing measurement (70% errors under 0.5 seconds).