Mindful Eating Design Cards
A tool for designing mindful eating technologies
MEDEC Cards
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 human-computer interaction (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, Guluzade and Sas explored an analysis of health research on mindful eating principles, measurement scales, and therapeutic interventions such as the MB-EAT program, which helped to identify the main aspects of mindful eating, as well as conducted a scoping review on technologies targeting these aspects. This exploration led to the design of MEDEC (Mindful Eating Design Cards), which was evaluated with 36 mindful eating expert practitioners through individual workshops.
This research was published in the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM TOCHI) journal, 2026.
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The MEDEC deck includes a total of 29 cards with their sensitizing questions. Technology cards to explore technology and its functionalities and to consider how it might support or hinder mindful eating aspects. Mindful eating aspects/ bodily sensory aspect cards to explore mindful eating aspects related to awareness of bodily sensations for savoring food and internal bodily sensations. Mindful eating aspects cards to explore mindful eating aspects related to awareness of the eating experience and non-judgmental acceptance.
The MEDEC deck includes a total of 21 cards with their specific descriptions. Mindful eating aspects/ bodily sensory aspect cards to explore mindful eating aspects related to awareness of bodily sensations for savoring food and internal bodily sensations. Mindful eating aspects cards to explore mindful eating aspects related to awareness of the eating experience and non-judgmental acceptance.
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MEDEC cards is freely available to download in a digital version
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For practitioners or users
Guluzada, L. and Sas, C., 2026. Mindful Eating Aspects as Bridging Concepts Represented through the MEDEC Cards: Towards a Design Framework for Mindful Eating Technologies. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 72 pages