Neurological Evidence of Diverse Self-Help Breathing Trainings with Virtual Reality and Bio-Feedback Assistance

Summary

The goal of this research is to learn about the neuro-mechanism beneath breath training, mindfulness meditation, or periods of idleness. This research also focuses on the use of virtual reality (VR) and bio-feedback (BF) integrated assistance system in breath training, and seeks for the potential of generalizing breath training in public.

The main questions it aims to answer are:

Whether and how people's neuro-mechanism (indicated by EEG indexes) changes when they are performing different breath training techniques (i.e., mindful breathing, guided breathing, and breath counting).

Researchers will compare the neuro-markers when participants perform different styles of breath training.

Participants will:

* Participants will equip an EEG system, a VR headset, a respiratory belt, and a heartbeat sensor.
* Participants will perform resting state task, mindful breathing task, guided breath task, and breath counting task respectively.
* EEG activity, breath rate, reaction time, accuracy, and HRV will be recorded. Each session will last approximately two hours.

Conditions

• Breath Training Styles

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Resting State

Resting state is a mental state and a research paradigm that people do nothing and idle as much as possible to show their baseline neuro signals. In this task, we instructed participants to rest with their eyes opened for 6 minutes. The VR environment of blue sky and swaying meadow was presented to the participants throughout this task.

BEHAVIORAL

Mindful Breathing

Mindful breathing is a state that people focus on their inner sensation. In this task, the meadow's motion in the VR environment corresponded to the participants' inhalation and exhalation, as detected by the respiration belt. The participants were instructed to focus mentally on their bodily sensations as they breathed, with the meadow's sway as a visual cue.

BEHAVIORAL

Guided Breathing

Guided breathing refers to the breath training technique that trainees are guided to inhale and exhale according to a fixed tempo. In this task, meadow swayed in a fixed tempo of 4 seconds back and 6 seconds forth. The participants were instructed to synchronize their inhalation with the meadow's backward motion (lasting 4 seconds) and their exhalation with its forward motion (lasting 6 seconds).

BEHAVIORAL

Breath Counting

Breath counting refers to the breath training technique that trainees mentally count the numbers of breath cycles they have finished in a certain period of time. In this task, similar to the mindful breathing task, the meadow's motion was synchronized with the participants' breathing patterns. During the 6 minutes, we instructed the participants to breathe naturally and mentally count their breathing cycles.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan

  collaborator OTHER_GOV

• Hei-Yin Hydra Ng

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

20 Years

Max Age

80 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-05-11

Primary Completion

2022-03-31

Completion

2022-03-31

Countries

• Taiwan

Study Locations