BreathTray: augmenting respiration self-regulation without cognitive deficit.

Concerns grow concerning the negative impact information work has on stress, anxiety, and cognitive performance. This has led to recent research on technological methods that attempt to augment the user's psycho-physiological self-regulatory processes. Rather than explicit prompting and reminders, BreathTray incentivizes calm respiration with continuous monitoring and feedback integrated into the desktop. This paper shows that such techniques do not significantly distract users from their work. The feedback effectively influenced users' respiration patterns when they worked on a single intensive task but not while multi-tasking.