## 5 Integrating Meditation and Mindfulness Practices with Body-Sensing Devices  
Reported effects of mindfulness practice, with regard to the management of affective reactions and the improvement of cognitive functioning, strengthen the considerations of its potential for promoting psychological well-being and intervening in clinical contexts. Nonetheless, such potential is hampered by certain methodological requirements of the mindfulness approach. Indeed, traditional mindfulness protocols (as well as meditation protocols overall) require a rather intense exercise and constant commitment, two aspects that often lead to a gradual decrease of motivation and, consequently, to the suspension of individual practices [68; 69; 70]. The impact of such limitations might be reduced by the support of external devices that are able to make the practice less demanding and track individual progress over time, thus lowering the requested effort [69]. Motivation and intention are two building blocks of the mindfulness (and, globally, meditation) approach and lie at the core of neurocognitive mechanisms supporting such practices and their effects [71]. Further, they are both necessary to attain continuity in exercise. Many technologies developed to support meditation, thus, actually promote motivation by providing tips, sharing of results and experience in dedicated communities, plotting statistics, tracking advances, giving rewards, and setting milestones to reach in practice [69]. Those kinds of explicit, highly-salient and informative sources of information help to maintain practisers' awareness of their progress and advancements, thus fostering commitment and reflective reasoning on the effect of practice in managing automatic processing and unwanted implicit reactions. More recently, such increased investigation into new ways to make meditation more accessible, and to empower self-awareness skills, led to the development of novel protocols that integrate mindfulness-based practice and body-sensing devices, such as biofeedback and neurofeedback systems. The improvement of emotion regulation and self-regulatory skills is probably the primary reason why people become interested and start practising mindfulness [72]. The research and clinical tradition of neuro-/bio-feedback interventions might then strongly contribute toward this goal. As a first example, the \"Spire\" [73] is a biofeedback and activity tracker system targeting the breathing pattern of the user. Namely, it is able to estimate the mental state of the person who wears it from his/her breathing activity, inform him/her in case of increased stress or elevated tension, and guide him/her through breathing exercises for relaxation. The system is also supported by an app that gives rewards based on calmness and focus periods and also sets daily goals. By increasing awareness of breathing habits as well as promoting insight to the user's mental states, the system builds on the well-established tradition of mindfulness practices based on the observation of the breath cycle and all associated bodily sensation. By making these observations more accessible to consciousness, due to easily-interpretable feedbacks, there is a greater awareness of implicit affective reactions as well as more efficient emotion regulation [74]. Another example of an integrated breathing biofeedback system devised to accompany and support mindfulness-based practices is the \"Sonic Cradle\" [75; 76]. Born as an art installation, it uses breath-related signals to manipulate soundscapes and proved to be able to promote relaxation, though such evidence has been criticized [77]. In addition, the \"Meditation Chamber\" [78] is a complex system combining virtual reality and biofeedback technology to reduce stress, guide relaxation techniques, and support mindfulness practice. The system records arousal, breathing, and heart rate biosignals, translating this implicit information flow into informative feedback signals.