Mindful Eating Aspects as Bridging Concepts Represented through the MEDEC Cards: Towards a Design Framework for Mindful Eating Technologies

Eating is complex, as is people's relationship to food, which significantly impacts wellbeing and health. Mindful eating interventions have been shown to be effective in addressing problematic eating, and mindful eating has also gained increasing interest as a research topic in HCI, albeit with limited grounding in health research, so that we know little about how HCI work could be informed by health research on mindful eating and its interventions. Such a theoretical foundation grounded in health research is crucial to ensure the design of safe and effective mindful eating technologies and interventions. To address this gap, we present an analysis of health research on mindful eating principles, measurement scales, and therapeutic interventions such as the MB-EAT program, which helped us identify the main aspects of mindful eating. Then, we conducted a scoping review on technologies targeting these aspects, from which we curated 16 design exemplars representing the breadth of these technologies and generated a new SmartPlate conceptual design. Then, we designed the Mindful Eating Design Critique (MEDEC) cards and reported workshops with 36 mindful eating practitioners who used the MEDEC cards to critique the set of design exemplars. Our main contributions include a solid theoretical foundation grounded in health research for the design of mindful eating technologies, the MEDEC cards as a novel critique tool consisting of 29 cards improved based on practitioners’ feedback, and a design framework to further support research and development of mindful eating technologies.