Pages, Categories, and Times

Pages

Psygraph consists of several tools that monitor your information.  For example, when you start and stop the Stopwatch, the start and stop times are logged to a server.  While the Stopwatch is running, various data that you specify (such as GPS location and acceleration) will also be logged.

Briefly, the four tools are:

  • Stopwatch: The Stoppwatch tool is used for tracking the length of time that you meditate or spend on another activity.
  • Timer: The Timer tool is used to set reminders, such as a gong which indicates the end of a meditation session. You can also set the gong to go off at a random time during the day and print an inspirational quote.
  • Counter: The Counter tool is used for the practice of breath counting, which can be used as a measure of mindfulness. You can also use this page to set a motion alarm that goes off if you move too much :).
  • Note: The note page allows you to annotate your meditation sessions with text and/or audio notes. These notes can automatically create posts on your WordPress server if you are logged in and that option has been turned on.

Categories
All events and their associated time and position data belong to a particular category.  The default category is “Uncategorized”, but you may create new categories for your data and change the category of existing data.  If you wish to see the data belonging to all categories, you can create the special “*” category (categories can be created on the Preferences page). Categorizing the data is useful if you wish to distinguish the timers for different types of events (such as time spent in shamatha vs vipassana meditation).

Times
All events have a time.  The time of an event is specified as follows:

DAYS:HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS.FRACTION

For example, to specify one minute and eight seconds, you would write “1:08”.  To specify one and a half seconds, you would write “1.5”.  This format extends to months and years in an obvious way (today’s date would be YYYY:MM:DD:HH:MM:SS). If you wish to specify one hour, just write “1:00:00” (or, since zero minutes and seconds is the default, you can just write “1::”).

The Data
The data from Psygraph can be used in different ways. Within the application itself, the data can be displayed as a list of events, as a 2-D graph, or on a map. The data can also be emailed to you, or kept in sync with a WordPress site from which it can be exported in various formats, and then processed in other applications.

Xmas 2017

Version 0.8.2 has been released, with lots of interface changes and other good changes.

I also have a 30-minute meditation workflow that I’d like to recommend:

  1. Sit in your favorite place to meditate and start the stopwatch.
  2. Switch to the breath counter and meditate while counting breaths (5 minutes)
  3. Switch to the timer and set it to deliver messages in a loop every 4-8 minutes (20 minutes)
  4. Switch to the note page and record your experience.

Going forward, more effort will be spent on the website and delivering feedback about your meditation sessions.  We are also working on an automatic breath counter that uses accelerometer data, that can be used to count any recurring signal (such as prostrations).

 

Version 0.7

Version 0.7 of the App will be available for download in the next week or so for both IOS and Android.

It has been significantly improved in terms of usability and feature set.
Of particular note is the breath counting feature in the Counter tool, which can be used as a measure of mindfulness.
Basically, you must track count your breaths up to ten, and then press a button to reset the counter to zero.
Your ability to accurately indicate the current count is both a way to focus on your breath and a measure of mindfulness.

The integration with WordPress is also smoother, and now allows the creation of posts from notes and automatic RSS feeds.
This allows notes with included audio to become a podcast: I am fairly certain that there are no other meditation apps that create a podcast.
I hope you find that statement as amusing as I do.

Also, I am going on retreat to a Zen center for several months, so new features and bug reports will not be able to be addressed until this summer.

Regards and wishes for your equanimity,
-alec

Measuring Mindfulness

How can one measure mindfulness?
What is this app besides a timer?

Well, one thing that we’ve made easier is based on a suggestion by Richie Davidson, who states that a very simple measure of mindfulness is simply counting one’s breaths. Basically, you can use the Counter page to count breaths, pressing the right button on every breath. Then on every 9th or 11th breath, you press the left button, which will reset the counter. When you are done with a meditation session, you will have a series of counted breaths. That data can be analyzed to determine if you miscounted (e.g. counted lower or higher than 9) and to determine your average breathing rate (to monitor how it changed over time). There is a script to do this analysis which can be obtained by writing to info @ psygraph . com .

To make the counting process easy to do without looking at the screen, you can tap on the screen instead of pressing the buttons. On each screen with buttons, the right button can be pressed by tapping once anywhere in the lower potion of the screen. Similarly, the left button can be pressed by double-clicking. If you are holding the phone in your hand, remember to turn off shake-detection for the Counter by visiting the page settings.

We are currently working to make psygraph easy to use: any suggestions are welcome.

Regards,
the Psygraph development team

Version 0.5

Version 0.5 is about to ship.

The WordPress plugin has been approved, and the source code will be available from the WP Subversion repository shortly.

I will upload the Android application later today: I am happy to report that there are no known bugs, and the app is performing solidly both offline and online. That said, back up any important data using CSV until at least version 1.0.

Thanks to all of the beta testers for their feedback and support.

-alec

Psygraph data for admin

Note: in order for the links on this page to work for all viewers, you must select ‘Allow public access’ on the Prefs page of the Psygraph application.

Events

[pg_events max=”100″]

Audio notes

[pg_page page=”audio”]

Map

[pg_events display=”map” max=”100″]

2D Graph

[pg_events display=”graph2D” max=”100″ field=”acceleration”]

3D Graph

[pg_events display=”graph3D” max=”100″ field=”acceleration”]

Input (upload Psygraph data)

[pg_page page=”input”]

Output (download Psygraph data)

  • CSV: [pg_link linktext=”Comma-separated values” format=”csv”]
  • HTML: [pg_link linktext=”Web page” format=”html”]
  • KML: [pg_link linktext=”Map” format=”kml”]
  • ICS: [pg_link linktext=”Calendar” format=”ics”]

Changing the Category Settings

Someday, the Psygraph category settings will integrate better with WordPress.  Until that day, you can edit the categories using the web client.

Every Psygraph category has the following modifiable options:

  • Description: the category description.
  • Style: A CSS style file that governs the display of each category: think of it as a “skin” that only nerds can alter.
  • Sound: The sound that is played when a timer elapses in the given category.
  • Text: An XML file that shows the display.

Each of these fields can be changed by setting the URL of a new file (either CSS, audio, or XML) in the relevant edit box.  If you are using the web client, it is also possible to specify the sound directly by base-64 encoding it (in the web client, click on the link to the left of the edit box).

The Style, Sound, and Text files that ship with the program can be found at http://psygraph.com/webclient/media/.  If you wish to provide your own alert quotes, you might start by modifying http://psygraph.com/webclient/media/pg3.xml.