Estimation of Motion and Respiratory Characteristics during the Meditation Practice Based on Video Analysis

Abstract

Meditation practice is mental health training. It helps people to reduce stress and suppress negative thoughts. In this paper, we propose a camera-based meditation evaluation system, that helps meditators to improve their performance. We rely on two main criteria to measure the focus: the breathing characteristics (respiratory rate, breathing rhythmicity and stability), and the body movement. We introduce a contactless sensor to measure the respiratory rate based on a smartphone camera by detecting the chest keypoint at each frame, using an optical flow based algorithm to calculate the displacement between frames, filtering and de-noising the chest movement signal, and calculating the number of real peaks in this signal. We also present an approach to detecting the movement of different body parts (head, thorax, shoulders, elbows, wrists, stomach and knees). We have collected a non-annotated dataset for meditation practice videos consists of ninety videos and the annotated dataset consists of eight videos. The non-annotated dataset was categorized into beginner and professional meditators and was used for the development of the algorithm and for tuning the parameters. The annotated dataset was used for evaluation and showed that human activity during meditation practice could be correctly estimated by the presented approach and that the mean absolute error for the respiratory rate is around 1.75 BPM, which can be considered tolerable for the meditation application.

Long-Latency Event-Related Potentials (300–1000 ms) of the Visual Insight

“…Various neurobiological insights suggest that presenting a solution or a decision clue leads to the same Aha! moment as attempting an inner decision [ 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ].…”

Mindfulness-Based Student Training Improves Vascular Variability Associated With Sustained Reductions in Physiological Stress Response

“…Stress reduction, as mentioned earlier, is of great personal as well as public health importance in a wide variety of areas. For young people and students, various approaches are being taken in this regard ( 48 ), such as the use of yoga ( 49 ), meditation ( 50 ), biofeedback procedures ( 51 , 52 ), and even different mindfulness-based interventions ( 37 , 53 , 54 ).…”

“…Though, there is a growing interest in identifying the physiological parameters representing autonomic regulation that correlate with the detection of stress as well as the reduction of stress levels. In particular, these include electrodermal activity, heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration, blood pressure, pulse, and vascular variability ( 32 , 37 , 50 , 51 , 55 ). Stress affects the cardio-vascular system, which can be detected by parameters of the pulse curve ( 32 ) or blood pressure ( 56 ).…”

Psychological and Neurophysiological Screening Investigation of the Collective and Personal Stress Resilience

“…This includes both traditional psychological testing, as well as complex registration of a number of parameters—EEG, event-related potentials, ECG, EMG, fMRI, respiratory and vegetative parameters that characterize physical, mental (including cognitive) and professional health [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ]. Recently, approaches utilizing the modeling of virtual reality and neural networks have been developed [ 5 , 6 ]. All of the above is undoubtedly of scientific interest.…”