Meditation could be a blockbuster drug except that it is free. The American Medical Association recommends transcendental-style meditation for lowering blood pressure. Meditation is good for cardio health and over 300 peer-reviewed published studies have found positive benefits for the treatment of PTSD, stress, and other conditions. Meditation has also been found to positively influence outcomes for mental tasks involving concentration and memory.

But like learning to swim, it can be difficult to learn from a book, or even a video. Official Transcendental Meditation™ training costs $1500 at standard pricing. This device is something that could be produced at low cost to serve an extremely valuable medical need: training people in how to do transcendental-style meditation. Unlike brainwave entrainment devices, this device trains the user so that the device becomes unnecessary. Experienced meditators and naïve users have tried this device and reported that it helped them to achieve a meditative state.

This device uses a make-shift pneumograph constructed from the air bladder of a sphygmomanometer connected to a gas pressure sensor for precise, clean, and instant measurement of the user’s breathing. The sensor is connected to a Propeller BOE programmed to auto-scale the pressure reading, and produce a simulated verbal chorus, chanting a mantra to the user’s breathing. This audio response is delivered through the headphone jack of the BOE. The chant is in stereo, with a small amount of echo, with spacially separated voices in higher and lower harmonized tones with a vibrato effect at 5 hz to promote theta brainwave entrainment. These features are built from Chip Gracey’s awesome vocal tract and stereo specializer modules.