Lab

The Stanford Calming Technology Lab, in Media-X is an inter-disciplinary group of scholars, designers, and builders that are inventing and evaluating technologies that create states of calm.

We draw on Stanford’s research groups in human-computer interaction,persuasive design, the psychophysiology of stress, the science of compassion, and social & cognitive psychology.

Our 3 pillars:

Pioneer
We further the global conversation around repurposing technologies to mitigate stress.

Publish
We publish scholarly articles that contain the design and evaluation of interactive prototypes as well as theoretical frameworks for evaluating and inventing those prototypes.

Prototype
We conduct rapid (sometimes even turbo) prototyping techniques to experiment with ideas and get user feedback.

Friends of CTL
Lab sponsors include technology firms committed to furthering research and development towards the design and evaluation of technologies that create calm.

  • bLife, Inc.
  • Lumoback
  • UCSF Dept of Psychiatry
  • Heartmath
  • Stanford CCARE: Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education

Mailing list
Subscribe to the lab mailing list by emailingcalmingtech+subscribe@googlegroups.com. 
The lab Twitter account is @calmingtech.  Please use #calmingtech as a hashtag.

Lab members

Neema Moraveji, Ph.D. (Director) – www.moraveji.org and @moraveji
Neema’s dissertation was entitled “Augmented Self-Regulation” and concerned the design and evaluation of a system for influencing ambulatory respiratory behavior.

Roy Pea, Ph.D. (PI, Faculty in Learning Sciences & Technology Design) -www.stanford.edu/~roypea
Roy is the director of HSTAR and started the Learning Sciences program at both Northwestern Univ and Stanford University. 

Steph Habif, Ed.D. (Strategist and Producer) – @stephhabif
Steph is a Bay Area behavior designer and received her doctorate from Columbia University in Health Education.

Emily Goligoski (masters student) – @emgollie
Emily started the Women 2.0 In Conversation series. Goligoski is on the board of the International Museum of Women and contributes to Mashable, KQED MindShift, and other publications.

Charlton Soesanto (computer science masters student)

Takehiro Hagiwara (Sony corp. visiting scholar)

Ken Jung (bio-mechanical-engineering PhD)

Poorna Krishnamoorthy (CS AI)

Abhishek Sharma (EE masters)

Mahmoud Saadat (EE PhD student, hardware researcher)

Mohammad Hekmat, Ph.D. (Hardware and sensor researcher)

Jim Zheng (Software designer and researcher)

Marily Oppezzo, Ph.D. (Health behavior researcher)
Marily is a Ph.D. candidate in LSTD at Stanford and works on behavior change in health and wellness behaviors. 

BJ Fogg, Ph.D. (Advisor, Director of Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab)

Jeff Heer, Ph.D. (Advisor, Stanford faculty in Computer Science and Information Visualization)

Inactive members

Richard Lo (recent graduate)

David Ngo (Behavior Design major)

Neekaan Oshidary (co-term)