Posts by Sean Patrick Hickey

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.