The cue is key: Design for real-life remembering

This paper aims to put the memory cue in the spotlight. We show how memory cues are incorporated in the area of interaction design. The focus is on external memory cues - cues that exist outside the human mind but have an internal effect on memory reconstruction. Examples of external cues include people, environments, and things, where the latter are most relevant for the aim of this paper since these cues can be incorporated in designs. This paper makes a dual contribution to research: (1) it provides insights into how memory research informs the design of devices to facilitate personal memory recall; and (2) by taking a design perspective, it raises questions about memory cues as part of real-life remembering to inform psychological memory research. Since memory theory inspires design and both fields would benefit from collaboration, we would like these questions to be an inspiration for future memory research, in particular targeting external memory cues. © 2014 Hogrefe Publishing

Socio-technical lifelogging: deriving design principles for a future proof digital past

Lifelogging is a technically inspired approach that attempts to address the problem of human forgetting by developing systems that ‘record everything’. Uptake of lifelogging systems has generally been disappointing, however. One reason for this lack of uptake is the absence of design principles for developing digital systems to support memory. Synthesising multiple studies, we identify and evaluate 4 new empirically motivated design principles for lifelogging: Selectivity, Embodiment, Synergy and Reminiscence. We first summarise 4 empirical studies that motivate the principles, then describe the evaluation of 4 novel systems built to embody these principles. The design principles were generative, leading to the development of new classes of lifelogging system, as well as providing strategic guidance about how those systems should be built. Evaluations suggest support for Selection and Embodiment principles, but more conceptual and technical work is needed to refine the Synergy and Reminiscence principles

Ubuntu considered in light of exclusion of people with disabilities

Background: This article emanates from a study funded by the KwaZulu-Natal chapter of South Africa’s National Research Foundation on the ‘Archaeology of Ubuntu’. It explores the notion of ubuntu and disability in a group of Zulu people from four communities within KwaZulu-Natal. The study is based on the notion that ubuntu is humaneness. Being human is linked to notions of care, respect and compassion. Objectives: The article explores the treatment of people with disabilities from the elders’ perspectives in this community. Method: This article is based on qualitative data resulting from structured interviews conducted in the KwaZulu-Natal Province between February and March 2015. Results: The results reveal that society considered the birth of a disabled child as a curse from God and punishment from the ancestors. The results also indicate that people with disabilities were excluded from community activities; marrying a disabled person was unthinkable because they were stigmatised and dehumanised. The work of Hannah Arendt is used to interrogate people’s perceptions of others with disabilities in their communities. Conclusion: The article posits that treatment of people with disabilities is not cast in stone but can be renegotiated and restructured through community engagement to represent genuine inclusion

IDEAL-CITIES: A Trustworthy and Sustainable Framework for Circular Smart Cities

Reflecting upon the sustainability challenges cities will be facing in the near future and the recent technological developments allowing cities to become "smart", we introduce IDEAL-CITIES; a framework aiming to provide an architecture for cyber-physical systems to deliver a datadriven Circular Economy model in a city context. In the IDEALCITIES ecosystem, the city's finite resources as well as citizens will form the pool of intelligent assets in order to contribute to high utilization through crowdsourcing and real-time decision making and planning. We describe two use cases as a vehicle to demonstrate how a smart city can serve the Circular Economy paradig

LifeLogging: personal big data

We have recently observed a convergence of technologies to foster the emergence of lifelogging as a mainstream activity. Computer storage has become significantly cheaper, and advancements in sensing technology allows for the efficient sensing of personal activities, locations and the environment. This is best seen in the growing popularity of the quantified self movement, in which life activities are tracked using wearable sensors in the hope of better understanding human performance in a variety of tasks. This review aims to provide a comprehensive summary of lifelogging, to cover its research history, current technologies, and applications. Thus far, most of the lifelogging research has focused predominantly on visual lifelogging in order to capture life details of life activities, hence we maintain this focus in this review. However, we also reflect on the challenges lifelogging poses to an information retrieval scientist. This review is a suitable reference for those seeking a information retrieval scientist’s perspective on lifelogging and the quantified self

Design Opportunities and Challenges in Indian Urban Slums-Community Communication and Mobile Phones

This thesis investigates the area of community communication for marginalized communities belonging to Indian urban slums. The aim of the thesis is to identify design challenges and opportunities for mobile based community communication services for residents of Indian urban slums. The thesis is based on two ethnographic field research done in urban slums of India. The research is qualitative in nature and is best identified as participatory bottom-up exploration. The research is grounded in the conceptual frameworks of Community Informatics, Communicative Ecology and Communities of Practices. The thesis discusses the existing practices of mobile phone's use amongst the residents of Indian urban slums, identifies the 'Human Nodes' in community communication at an Indian urban slums, presents design opportunities and challenges for community communication services for residents of Indian urban slums, and proposes a design concept called as 'Asynchronous Voice based Community Communication Service' for residents of Indian urban slums

Semantic interpretation of events in lifelogging

The topic of this thesis is lifelogging, the automatic, passive recording of a person’s daily activities and in particular, on performing a semantic analysis and enrichment of lifelogged data. Our work centers on visual lifelogged data, such as taken from wearable cameras. Such wearable cameras generate an archive of a person’s day taken from a first-person viewpoint but one of the problems with this is the sheer volume of information that can be generated. In order to make this potentially very large volume of information more manageable, our analysis of this data is based on segmenting each day’s lifelog data into discrete and non-overlapping events corresponding to activities in the wearer’s day. To manage lifelog data at an event level, we define a set of concepts using an ontology which is appropriate to the wearer, applying automatic detection of concepts to these events and then semantically enriching each of the detected lifelog events making them an index into the events. Once this enrichment is complete we can use the lifelog to support semantic search for everyday media management, as a memory aid, or as part of medical analysis on the activities of daily living (ADL), and so on. In the thesis, we address the problem of how to select the concepts to be used for indexing events and we propose a semantic, density- based algorithm to cope with concept selection issues for lifelogging. We then apply activity detection to classify everyday activities by employing the selected concepts as high-level semantic features. Finally, the activity is modeled by multi-context representations and enriched by Semantic Web technologies. The thesis includes an experimental evaluation using real data from users and shows the performance of our algorithms in capturing the semantics of everyday concepts and their efficacy in activity recognition and semantic enrichment

Mobile Essence : a mobile non-invasive platform for meeting notes capture

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, September 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-70).MobileEssence provides a light-weight, ubiquitous meeting capture tool which affords the user the ability to capture all important information, including recording what was just said, who said it, and what is being said at the moment. Traditional methods and tools for meeting information recording have often focused on the meeting-room as the nexus for useful information exchange. Instead, MobileEssence uses the mobile phone as a ubiquitous interface allowing notes to be captured anytime, anywhere while not requiring the user to change their focus. MobileEssence allows users to only record the important information and annotate this in real-time, instead of only allowing post-processing. We show that MobileEssence produces more effective meetings and post-meeting collaborations: User studies showed that users are not distracted by MobileEssence during meetings when compared to pen and pencil, and that they are better able to recollect events which were discussed during meetings.by Anthony Morris Johnson.S.M

Designing and evaluating a user interface for continous embedded lifelogging based on physical context

PhD ThesisAn increase in both personal information and storage capacity has encouraged people to store and archive their life experience in multimedia formats. The usefulness of such large amounts of data will remain inadequate without the development of both retrieval techniques and interfaces that help people access and navigate their personal collections. The research described in this thesis investigates lifelogging technology from the perspective of the psychology of memory and human-computer interaction. The research described seeks to increase my understanding of what data can trigger memories and how I might use this insight to retrieve past life experiences in interfaces to lifelogging technology. The review of memory and previous research on lifelogging technology allows and support me to establish a clear understanding of how memory works and design novel and effective memory cues; whilst at the same time I critiqued existing lifelogging systems and approaches to retrieving memories of past actions and activities. In the initial experiments I evaluated the design and implementation of a prototype which exposed numerous problems both in the visualisation of data and usability. These findings informed the design of novel lifelogging prototype to facilitate retrieval. I assessed the second prototype and determined how an improved system supported access and retrieval of users’ past life experiences, in particular, how users group their data into events, how they interact with their data, and the classes of memories that it supported. In this doctoral thesis I found that visualizing the movements of users’ hands and bodies facilitated grouping activities into events when combined with the photos and other data captured at the same time. In addition, the movements of the user's hand and body and the movements of some objects can promote an activity recognition or support user detection and grouping of them into events. Furthermore, the ability to search for specific movements significantly reduced the amount of time that it took to retrieve data related to specific events. I revealed three major strategies that users followed to understand the combined data: skimming sequences, cross sensor jumping and continued scanning