A Multimedia System for Breath Regulation and Relaxation

In the hectic life today, detrimental stress has caused numerous illness. To adjust mental states, breath regulation plays a core role in multiple relaxation techniques. In this paper, we introduce a multimedia system supporting breath regulation and relaxation. Features of this system include non-contact respiration detection, bio-signal monitoring, and breath interaction. In addition to illustrating this system, we also propose a novel form of breath interaction. Through this form of breath interaction, the system effectively influenced user breath such that their breathing features turned into patterns that appeared when people were relaxed. An experiment was conducted to compare the effects of three forms of regulation, the free breathing mode, the pure guiding mode, and the local-mapping mode. Experiment results show that multimedia-assisted breath interaction successfully deepened and slowed down user breath, compared with free breathing mode. Besides objective breathing feature changes, subjective feedback also showed that participants were satisfied and became relaxed after using this system.