Project Overview
The Mind-Full project started in Nepal with this question: How can we provide education for some of the world’s poorest children? Even with access to education many children are unable to stay calm and focus on learning due to the multiple traumas they have suffered: poverty, parental mental illness and addictions, homelessness and civil war. In the Mind-Full project we first explored how to design a brain-computer interface for tablet-based self-regulation games to help children living in poverty in Pokhara (Nepal) learn to self-regulate anxiety and attention. The Mind-Full brain-tablet application makes invisible brain processes visible in ways that children can understand. It is a modern take on the ancient practice of meditation using neurofeedback. Results from a 14 week field trial with an waitlist control group showed that children were able to complete the Mind-Full intervention, transfer self-regulation skills into the classroom and onto the playground, and the effects were maintained for 2 months post-intervention.
Based on these successful outcomes, we refined Mind-Full, built three new versions, Mind-Full Wind (Nepal), Mind-Full Wild (Urban), and Mind-Full Sky (Aboriginal) and released beta versions of the new Mind-Full apps on the Google Play store. In a second 16 week field trial with an waitlist control group in an urban centre in Canada, working with a population of young children (ages 6 to 8) with a history of trauma and/or anxiety and attentional challenges, we found similar results on behavioral measures and significant evidence of improvement on objective measures including repeated salivary cortisol tests (stress) and tests of executive functioning (attention).
Current Team
- Alissa N. Antle: Research, Project and Design Lead
- Leslie Chesick, Nepal House Society and UBC Counselling Services, Trauma Therapist
- Elgin-Skye McLaren, Project Manager
- Shubhra Sarker, Programming
Previous Team
Graduate Students and Staff
- Srilekha Kirshnamachari Sridharan, Data Analysis
- Anja Haman Consulting, Business Case Development
- Randa Aljohani, Testing
- Christine Best, Marketing and Web
- Aaron Levisohn: Project Manager and Usability Researcher
- Anna Macaranas: Project Manager
Undergraduate Students
- Perry Tan, System Programming
- Fan Lin, Art
- Saba Nowroozi: Interaction Design
- Rachael Eckersley (FCAT Undergraduate Research Award): Art
- Joseph Leung: Programming
- Nathan Waddington: Android-Neurosky Programming
Funded By
NSERC Discovery
NSERC Accelerate
GRAND NCE
MSR