Meditaide: Meditation Tool

TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED MEDITATION 
A tool for meditation that alerts you when your mind starts wandering or you start dozing off.  Now you can spend more time experiencing calm and peace during your meditation. Achieve better relaxation and mindfulness than you have ever done before! Take the guesswork out of your meditation practice with real-time feedback.
Works by looking at the duration of your breath cycle, using the motion sensor on the smartphone. It comes with a meditation timer and keeps track of your meditation sessions.

THE PROBLEM:

The most common problem that beginners to 'breath-watching' meditation face is that your mind keeps wandering off to anything but your breath. Or you keep nodding off to sleep. 

MEDITAIDE COMES TO THE AIDE OF MEDITATION:

It can detect when you are lost in thoughts during meditation or when you are nodding off to sleep and gently alert you, helping you to bring your attention back to the breath. 

It works using the motion sensor inside the smartphone. No other expensive accessories needed.

USING THE APP:

The app has a simple interface. You can set the timer for the meditation duration and also the 'Thought detection sensitivity'.

Sensitivity:
There are three levels of sensitivity. Experiment with the three levels to find out which suits you the best. Beginners might find a 'low' sensitivity to be better, because as beginners you might find it hard to keep your focus on the breath. We don't want you to be dissuaded from the practice of meditation at the start itself. More expert meditators might choose the 'high' sensitivity.

After choosing these settings time to start your meditation. The app needs to detect your breath. For this tie your belt around your belly. Insert the phone between your belt and belly vertically.

If you don't want to use a belt, wear pajamas and shove your phone into the pajamas halfway through, so that half the phone is visible above your pajamas waistline.

Or just hold the phone vertically against your belly with one hand or use both hands as shown in the intro video.

Now sit up straight either on a chair or if you can, on the ground. Sitting on a chair works best. You need to keep your spine erect.

Now click on the 'Start' button to start your meditation session. Close your eyes and focus on the breath. 

Take gentle deep belly breaths, the belly should expand outward and contract inward on each inhalation and exhalation. Just keep doing this throughout the session making sure that the duration of each inhalation and exhalation is the same and the combined breath duration is always greater than 8 seconds. When your mind wanders off or you start nodding off, there is a drop in the duration of the breath, and Meditaide detects this using the motion sensor.

The app starts playing the sound of water in a lake as soon as you start the session. As and when it detects that you have lost your concentration and are no longer focusing on the breath, it plays the sound of birds chirping, to alert you, when this happens gently bring your awareness back to the breath to make it slower and deeper.

TRACK YOUR MEDITATION PERFORMANCE:

You can see how your performance has fared over time by clicking the charts icon on the main screen.
The charts page shows you
1. The total amount of time you spent in meditation each day
2. The total distractions you had in a day
3. Your performance by calculating the number of distractions per hour.

OTHER FEATURES:

1.You can set Do-Not-Disturb to automatically turn on when you start meditation so that your are not interrupted by calls or notifications.

2.You can also skip the introductory voice over that plays at the start of the session

3. You can disable the existing 'water flowing' sound that plays in the background and play your own favorite meditation music in the background from any music app. Meditaide will end the background music at the end of the session.