Sean Patrick Hickey
Library Blogs
Showing 41 - 50 of 2015 items
Meditation has been deeply impactful in my life, and I want others to experience the positive shifts that come with it. Reflecting on my nine years of practice, I realized that current tools fail to track progress objectively or adapt to a person’s real-time needs. As a regular user of the Headspace app, I’ve often wondered if I’m performing the technique correctly or if my experience is actually deepening over time. A major limitation with standard guided meditations is their reliance on fixed-interval reminders. If a user loses focus ten seconds after an awareness reminder, they might spend the next few minutes lost in thought rather than training their mind. This inspired me to create a system where awareness reminders could adapt to the user by detecting when focus is lost and gently nudging them back immediately. This approach helps sustain awareness longer, naturally decreasing the need for reminders as the user’s skill improves.
The U-M Library mini grant provided the support needed to make this happen. With the funding to purchase a Muse Athena EEG (electroencephalography) headset, I brought the idea to my graduate Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course and teamed up with Alexander Bartolozzi, Donald Lin, and Annus Zulfiqar. Together, we built Reflect - an EEG-powered app that uses machine learning to accelerate the learning rate of meditation practices. It tracks meditation states in real-time, playing a gentle audio cue to restore awareness when the mind wanders, and dynamically adapts to the user's ability to maintain focus.
The U-M Library mini grant provided the support needed to make this happen. With the funding to purchase a Muse Athena EEG (electroencephalography) headset, I brought the idea to my graduate Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course and teamed up with Alexander Bartolozzi, Donald Lin, and Annus Zulfiqar. Together, we built Reflect - an EEG-powered app that uses machine learning to accelerate the learning rate of meditation practices. It tracks meditation states in real-time, playing a gentle audio cue to restore awareness when the mind wanders, and dynamically adapts to the user's ability to maintain focus.
Join us this Thursday, January 15th, between 4-6p for our first Third Thursdays at the Library event of the semester!
To the people that knew her best, Betty Jean “BJ” Busch was irrepressible. Busch had a highly successful career as a librarian and the focus of her family's gift in her memory is her educational experience at the University of Michigan and her early work as a cataloger at the U-M Library.
3D printed stands for Nintendo Switch and Gamecube controllers.
We are pleased to announce the opening of this exciting new exhibit at the Hatcher Gallery Exhibit Room! Explore a diverse array of Greco-Roman artifacts which were created to communicate with and call upon various unseen, supernatural forces for aid and protection. When? January 9-April 30, 2026.
The Man in the Iron Mask is the final adventure in Dumas' Musketeer Saga. The former Musketeer, Aramis, now a bishop, plans to replace the villainous king, Louis XIV, with his identical twin brother, a masked prisoner in the Bastille. This novel brings the series to a thrilling conclusion, and it has inspired numerous film adaptations. But don't expect the novel to have the same ending as the 1998 film, which is probably the best-known adaptation.
