MindFi, a Southeast Asian leader in digital wellness, today launched the third generation of its mobile application, MindFi V3, that will pioneer a brand new mindfulness and meditation experience for modern working and living.

Mindfulness is described as a state characterised by awareness and attention to present-moment thoughts and sensations and having a non-judgemental stance towards those experiences. The app upgrade will debut a novel way to measure a user’s mindfulness level based on the latest neuroscience research, as part of a collaboration with Duke-NUS Medical School that aims to bring scientific rigour to the practice.

The new upgrade will further enhance MindFi’s vision of “Be mindful anytime” by adding a recommendation system that analyzes a user’s body clock to suggest practices that will maximize mental focus or relaxation.

“MindFi V3 marks our most important step of integrating mindfulness into our digital lifestyles for mental wellbeing and peak performance. We have partnered with esteemed teachers and researchers to re-imagine mindfulness for the smartphone era and make it truly accessible anytime, anywhere. ” said MindFi Co-founder and CEO Bjorn Lee. “Collaborating with Duke-NUS Medical School allows us to quantify the benefits of mindfulness, a field which has remained largely untouched. This helps bring us closer to our mission of helping busy people to be mindful anytime for calmer and more productive lives.”

According to the Mayo Clinic, mindfulness and meditation can be used to help reduce stress and tension and in recent years has risen globally in popularity. However, researchers have relied largely on questionnaires to measure it until a behavioral measure, involving breath counting, was developed by Professor Richard Davidson and his team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Mindfulness research has long relied on subjective self-reporting by study subjects, which is prone to biases that can render research results limited or ambiguous.” stated Dr. Julian Lim, head of the Duke-NUS research team for the MindFi collaboration. “With the launch of MindFi V3, we seek to deepen our research with a method known as the Breath Counting Task (BCT) that can objectively and quantifiably measure mindfulness in an individual. How accurately an individual is able to keep this count is an indicator of how mindfully he or she performs the task. My team has used this method to sort individuals into ‘high’ and ‘low’ mindfulness groups, and found differences in brain connectivity between the two groups using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By analyzing the data collected through MindFi, we hope to get a picture of how mindfulness varies across populations, how it changes over time and what health variables it could predict.”

“With so many apps in the “mindfulness space”, I am pleased to be associated with one that brings the benefits of modern technology to the ancient wisdom of mindfulness in a new and powerful way.” said Dr. Steven Hickman, a senior adviser of MindFi and Founding Director of the Center of Mindfulness at University of California, San Diego. “In a data-driven age, being able to map and notice progress in an activity like mindfulness meditation is a big plus. MindFi meets people where they are, invites them to explore the practice through what we call “informal practice”, weaving it into their daily activities, always keeping the larger arc of mindfulness training in mind. With time, those who use MindFi will find themselves folding mindfulness into their daily routine and making the changes that support them to lead a happier, more fulfilling and healthy life.”

MindFi V3 is available on Apple’s iOS platform and will arrive on Android phones in early 2019. 

REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION FROM DUKE-NUS