Meditation App Equa Now Tracks Your Breathing Using Only Your Phone

Built on 15 years of Carnegie Mellon research, the new Meditation Performance Insights feature gives breathing feedback on every meditation session, no wearable required

PITTSBURGH, Oct. 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Equa, the NIH-funded mindfulness training app founded at Carnegie Mellon University, today launched Meditation Performance Insights, which turns a smartphone into a breathing sensor for meditation practice. Users rest their phone on their chest during a guided session, and its motion sensors track each breath. When the session ends, Equa shows how their breathing changed and scores the session.

Most meditation apps log that you showed up. Equa shows what your breathing did while you were there, so you can see how each session went. The feature is built for people who have tried meditation and stopped because they couldn't tell whether it was working.

"Meditation is hard enough to stick with. You could meditate for years and never know if you were actually improving," said Mat Polowitz, Equa's CEO and co-founder. "Now you can watch it happen."

Equa grew out of more than 15 years of research at Carnegie Mellon University's Health and Human Performance Lab, directed by co-founder and Chief Science Officer Dr. David Creswell, the William S. Dietrich II Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon. Creswell has led placebo-controlled trials of mindfulness training and published more than 75 scientific articles.

"Equa is short for equanimity — the skill of not reacting to whatever comes up," Creswell said. "That's the actual mechanism, not 'calm' or 'relaxation.'"

Equa is available now on iPhone and Android, with sliding-scale pricing so cost isn't a barrier. Read Polowitz's announcement on the launch here.

About Equa
Equa is a meditation training app founded at Carnegie Mellon University's Health and Human Performance Lab by Mat Polowitz and Dr. David Creswell. Equa helps users build skills for stress resilience and mental well-being, with respiration tracking that provides physiological insights on each session using only a smartphone. Learn more at equahealth.io.

Research reported in this publication 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.

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SOURCE Equa