This Simple Audio Augmentation System Enhances Mindfulness, Focus, Say Researchers
Amplifying sounds near your hands sounds simple enough, but the impact on its users appears profound.
Researchers at Stanford University and Cornell University have developed a wearable designed to ground its users in the moment — with audible augmentation based the sound of quotidian tasks like stirring a coffee or handling a paper bag.
"There's so much time that we spend in these [everyday] moments – making coffee or waiting in line – where we find ourselves just endlessly scrolling on our phones," explains Sean Follmer, senior author of the paper and director of the SHAPE Lab at Stanford University. "Meanwhile, life is passing us by. We wanted to create something that makes us more aware of our surroundings and to appreciate the real world over the digital."
The device created in the project pairs open-ear headphones, which do not block out ambient sound, with wrist-mounted microphones that sample audio from manual tasks and play it back at an amplified level — a simple approach, but one which the researchers found improved focus on the task at hand.
"Mindfulness heightens our attention to otherwise mundane daily tasks and transforms routine actions into more purposeful focus and greater engagement in our everyday lives," explains first author Yujie Tao of the experiment's impact. "Participants with audio augmentation reported a statistically higher level of mindfulness. They also tended to explore objects for a longer time and exhibited more trial-and-error behaviors compared to those who did not have audio augmentation."
The testing saw 60 users interacting with a variety of objects, with half wearing the augmentation system and the other half unaided. Using generally-accepted questionnaires and tracked user behavior, plus qualitative feedback gathered by two mindfulness coaches, the device's positive impact was proven — with one participating claiming the experience to be "a way of helping people fall in love with the world again, like to recover things that have been lost."
The team's work has been published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, under open-access terms.