Prescription mindfulness via smartphone app: the next step in technological serenity. From the article:

You might know Headspace as a meditation app. What if it were also a prescription medication?

The California-based company recently launched Headspace Health, a subsidiary whose executives’ goal is to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a prescription meditation app by 2020. The company will soon launch a series of clinical trials to support an application.

The prescription products would include a specific dose and meditation technique for different health conditions, says Megan Jones Bell, the company’s chief science officer, who will lead the new health effort. “This will likely be a unique code that the physician gives a patient” for access to the program, she says….

Research into meditation’s impact on health is ongoing. Researchers are unclear on whether people benefit from a meditation app the way they can from group or individual meditation.

“The evidence is the strongest for meditation related to blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome and certainly in the area of lower-back pain,” says Wendy Weber, acting deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, part of the NIH. There is also a growing body of evidence showing how meditation can help patients with depression….

David Creswell, an associate professor in psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is planning to work with Headspace on a large workplace study examining its impact on the brain and immune system. The study would replicate similar studies he’s done testing the impact of meditation performed during in-person sessions, which showed a positive impact on brain functioning and the immune system.

Dr. Creswell’s research has already tested a 14-day mindfulness meditation app developed at Carnegie Mellon used for 20 minutes a day. The study, published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology in January, included 135 stressed adults divided into three different groups. Two weeks of mindfulness training was enough to reduce cortisol levels and blood pressure, two biological signs of stress.