A recent interest in interaction design is towards the development of novel technologies emphasizing the value of mindfulness, monitoring, awareness, and self-regulation for both health and wellbeing. Whereas existing systems have focused mostly on relaxation and awareness of feelings, there has been little exploration on tools supporting the self-regulation of attention during mindfulness sitting meditation. This paper describes the design and initial evaluation of MeditAid, a wearable system integrating electroencephalography (EEG) technology with an adaptive aural entrainment for real time training of mindfulness state. The system identifies different meditative states and provides feedback to support users in deepening their meditation. We report on a study with 16 meditators about the perceived strengths and limitations of the MeditAid system. We demonstrate the benefits of binaural feedback in deepening meditative states, particularly for novice meditators.
This article analyzes the online representations of the identity politics discourse of the elite Hindu nationalist community and the subaltern Dalit community. The assumptions underlying assertions about Hindu and Dalit identity on select Hindu nationalist and Dalit websites are remarkably similar despite deep ideological differences between the two. Developments in the Indian technological and cultural fields in the 1990s have enabled the emergence of a new mode of representing collective identity ('global primordiality'), which explains the resemblance between online Hindu nationalist and online Dalit discourse. The logic of global primordiality typically finds expression in cyberspace, where the realms of technology and culture intersect. The representational framework of global primordiality is shaped primarily by Hindu nationalists who also occupy a privileged position as elites in the Indian technological field. In its participation in cyberspace, Dalit discourse may tend to mirror this dominant mode of online representation, even as it remains opposed to Hindu nationalism.
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