Apps for Health and Wellness
Different activities that can be potentially embraced by almost any person such as physical exercise, deep and slow breathing or relaxation training have been shown to have beneficial effects on health and wellbeing. Mindfulness practice allows people to gain further advantages (e.g., in terms of psychological health, social relationships, and performance at various tasks) and has become the subject of a large amount of health research with literally thousands of journal papers published. Nevertheless, people have difficulty in learning and/or in regularly engaging in such activities, no matter how beneficial they could be to them. For these reasons, our lab explores how to use computers (and especially mobile devices) to make these activities simpler to approach and more appealing, supporting people in engaging with and practicing them.