AHs 2025 Pseudo-Heartbeat Feedback for Meditation Support

Can fake heartbeat sounds trick your body into relaxing? This system generates pseudo-heartbeat audio at rates slightly slower than your actual heart rate to induce calm and support meditation. Using a contactless radar sensor to detect real heartbeats, it creates slower auditory feedback (10-30% below actual BPM). Tested with 120 participants at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, results showed that hearing slower heartbeats made people feel their heart rate was decreasing—even when they knew the sounds were manipulated. The findings suggest potential for non-pharmacological treatment of insomnia through enhanced interoceptive awareness.

Akari Shimabukuro, Seioh Ezaki, and Keiichi Zempo. 2025. Meditation Support System Utilizing Pseudo-Heartbeat Auditory Feedback to Enhance Cardiac Interoceptive Awareness. In Proceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference 2025 (AHs '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3745900.3746096