## 6 Technology-Mediated Mindfulness Intervention: An Applied Example  
Keeping such methodological remarks in mind, we will briefly present a first set of results we obtained while formally testing the effect of intensive practice with the commercial brain-sensing headband MuseTM (InteraXon Inc., Toronto, ON, Canada), which was devised to support meditation and mindfulness-based practice. The study aimed at exploring the potential of the intensive technology-mediated intervention, based on awareness practices, and was supported by a wearable device monitoring cognitive-affective profiles and stress levels. A sample of forty university students presenting mild-to-moderate stress levels took part in the study. None of them reported ongoing concurrent therapies based on psychoactive drugs that can alter central nervous system functioning, presented clinically relevant stress levels, or experienced significant stressful life events during the previous 6 months. People with preceding systematic meditation experience have been excluded from the sample so to avoid potential methodological biases and confounds in the interpretation of outcome measures of the intervention. The participants were randomly divided into an active control group and an experimental group. Both groups were involved in a structured intervention, which lasted four weeks and was constituted by brief daily activities that were characterized by gradually increasing commitment. The experimental group underwent an intensive training using the MuseTM wearable device--namely an EEG recording system connected to a dedicated smartphone app that was devised to support meditation practices and help foster bodily and psychological awareness via regular activities based on mindfulness principles (see Figure 1). The active control group underwent a relaxation control intervention devised to be similar to the target intervention in its overall structure, in the amount of commitment it required, and in the modalities of fruition, but to critically differ in two core aspects of the MuseTM training: the active role of participants and the presence of informative real-time feedbacks on participants' mental states offered by the device and the app. Short-term effects of the intervention on perceived stress, cognitive performances, and EEG profile have been explored by assessing participants before, halfway, and after the end of the interventions. Perceived stress has been measured via the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10; [79]). The impact of the interventions on cognitive abilities was measured via a challenging battery of standardized neuropsychological tests and computerized reaction time tasks [80]. Namely, during computerized testing, participants had to complete a series of tasks tapping into different aspects of attention functions, from simple reaction tasks to an effortful response inhibition task. Table 1 reports the whole battery of psychometric and neuropsychological tests that have been administered during the assessment sessions. Resting-state and task-related EEG data have been collected via a 16-channel V-Amp amplifier (Brain Products GmbH, Gilching, Germany) and analysed via frequency-domain (power density for standard EEG frequency bands) and time-domain indices (event-related potentials--ERP), so to investigate potential modulations of the oscillatory profile and information-processing markers induced by the interventions. In particular, we focused on a measure of system responsiveness (namely, a quantification of the alpha-blocking phenomenon), on a measure related to the balance between brain correlates of relaxation and activation (namely, the alpha-beta ratio), and on event-related attention and executive control measures (namely, the amplitudes of the N2 ERP deflection). Perceived stress, cognitive performance, and EEG/ERP data were finally used to compute modulation indices weighted on individual baseline levels.