ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Comput. Sci.
Sec. Human-Media Interaction
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2025.1566940
This article is part of the Research TopicCutting-Edge Technologies for Multi-Sensory Research at the Frontier Between DisciplinesView all 3 articles
MyndFood: A Conversational Agent for Enhancing the Cooking and Eating Experience
Provisionally accepted
- 1Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education in Ensenada (CICESE), Ensenada, Mexico
- 2Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora (ITSON), Ciudad Obregón, Sonora2, Mexico
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The integration of technology into cooking and eating routines often leads to distractions, hindering mindfulness. Mindful eating involves awareness of the present moment and attention to sensory experiences. While mindful eating has been promoted, mindful cooking remains underexplored. As conversational agents become increasingly popular in diverse fields like education, healthcare, and e-commerce, we are leveraging this technology to promote mindfulness practices that enhance the cooking and eating experience. This paper introduces MyndFood, a conversational agent designed to promote mindful cooking and eating. We describe the development process of MyndFood and present the outcomes from a user experiment involving 40 participants who engaged with the system while preparing sushi. The study employed a between-subjects design featuring two conditions for the agent: mindful and non-mindful. Results indicate that participants in the mindful condition experienced greater enjoyment and heightened food awareness compared to those in the non-mindful condition.These findings suggest that conversational agents can enhance hedonic experiences and improve food awareness by promoting mindful practices.
Keywords: conversational agents, computational commensality, Digital commensality, Mindful Cooking, human-computer interaction
Received: 26 Jan 2025; Accepted: 10 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Parra, Favela and Castro. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Mario O. Parra, Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education in Ensenada (CICESE), Ensenada, Mexico
Jesus Favela, Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education in Ensenada (CICESE), Ensenada, Mexico
Luis A. Castro, Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora (ITSON), Ciudad Obregón, 85000, Sonora2, Mexico
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