Meditation Performance Insights, powered by respiration tracking, launches today. Using your phone as a sensor, you can now see how well you meditated.
By Mathew Polowitz, CEO and Co-Founder of Equa
I’ve been teaching meditation for over a decade, and in almost every workshop I’ve led, someone asks the same question: “How do I know if I’m doing this right?”
It’s a tough one to answer. When you go to the gym, you know you worked out. You’re sore the next day. Your muscles grow. Eventually you can lift more. Meditation doesn’t give you any of that. So most people stop.
That question is why Equa exists. And today we’re launching our answer.
What’s new
Starting today, all Equa users have access to Meditation Performance Insights: breath-based feedback on your meditation, using only your phone. Here’s how it works:
Rest your phone on your chest and start a session.
Equa tracks your breathing – rate, depth, and rhythm – using the motion sensors already in your phone.
When the session ends, you’ll see your results: average breathing rate, time spent in the ideal meditation zone, your skill level and an overall session score.
Then, track how those numbers move over time!
No wearable. No new hardware. Just the phone you already meditate with.
The technology behind it was developed with support from the National Institutes of Health through its Small Business Innovation Research program.
It measures one thing, your breath, and that’s on purpose. Breathing is something you can watch change as you practice, and seeing it change gives you something most meditation apps can’t: evidence your effort is paying off.
Built in a lab
Equa spun out of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, built on more than 15 years of research from my co-founder, Dr. David Creswell, and his Health and Human Performance Lab. David has spent his career running placebo-controlled trials to answer one central question: what makes people resilient to stress? Again and again, the answer pointed to specific styles of mindfulness meditation.
Early in his career, David taught meditation to Olympic speed skater Apolo Ohno at the U.S. Olympic Training Center. Athletes at that level train with constant feedback: times, splits, numbers they can work against. Meditation has never had that. We wanted to build it.
The name comes from the research, too. Equa is short for equanimity. “Equanimity is the skill of not reacting to whatever comes up,” David often says. “That’s the actual mechanism – not ‘calm’ or ‘relaxation.’” Equa’s guided sessions teach meditation as a skill you build, one you can take with you when you put the phone down. Respiration tracking lets you watch that skill develop.
Who it’s for
We built Equa for people who’ve tried meditation before and quit. If that’s you, you weren’t doing it wrong. You just had no way to know.
It’s for people managing chronic stress or physical discomfort who want something more concrete than “find your calm.” And it’s for people who already track their sleep and workouts and want the same kind of data from their mental health practice.
Tell us what you think
I’ll be honest: this is new. Breathing feedback from a phone alone hasn’t existed until now, and the people using it will shape where it goes next. We want to know what’s working well and what isn’t.
Reach out to support@equahealth.io to let us know what you think.
Equa’s pricing is sliding-scale. We’re a small team, and pricing it this way isn’t the easy choice for a startup. At the same time, it felt like a no-brainer. We feel anyone who wants an evidence-based meditation practice should be able to have one, whatever their budget. And if you can pay more, that helps cover someone who can’t.
Try it
Equa is available now for iPhone and Android. Start a session, put the phone on your chest, and see where your training goes.
We’ve been saying meditation is measurable since day one. Now you can see it for yourself.
Thank you to our team, to David and the researchers whose work this is built on, to our early users who tested every version and told us the truth about it, to the Unified Mindfulness system which fuels our curriculum, and to our funders, investors and advisors, including: the National Institutes of Health, the Richard King Mellon Foundation, Optum Startup Studio, Innovation Works, PromiseONE, VentureBridge, 99 Tartans, the Intuitive Foundation, Chris Forland, Stuart Poole, Gabe Fenton, James Valentine, Cem Kansu, Severin Hacker, Luis Von Ahn, and the many others who have helped us breathe life into Equa these past five years!
Yours,
Mat Polowitz
CEO & Co-Founder, Equa Health
Media Contact
Dana English
KALET
dana@kaletgroup.com | (814) 558-8435
Equa’s SBIR funding referenced in this writing was supported by the National Institute Of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R44MH134709. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.