Augmenting Human Digital Memories with Physiological Data

The area of human digital memories focuses on documenting our entire lifetime. Using this outlet, a diverse range of information can be brought together, such as photos, location, temperature and physiological information. Nowadays, we have access to a number of different data sources, thus allowing more dynamic and data rich memories to be created. In particular, the inclusion of physiological data offers a new insight into the augmentation of memories and provides a richer level of detail. This information can be used to determine how we were feeling, at any time, and, potentially, how we made others feel as well. Memories, created over a lifetime, can be retrieved, and we can see how our bodies have changed over time. This paper presents the DigMem system, which incorporates physiological data into the creation of human digital memories. A prototype has been successfully developed, which demonstrates the approach and evaluates the applicability of the research

Immersive Composition for Sensory Rehabilitation: 3D Visualisation, Surround Sound, and Synthesised Music to Provoke Catharsis and Healing

There is a wide range of sensory therapies using sound, music and visual stimuli. Some focus on soothing or distracting stimuli such as natural sounds or classical music as analgesic, while other approaches emphasize the active performance of producing music as therapy. This paper proposes an immersive multi-sensory Exposure Therapy for people suffering from anxiety disorders, based on a rich, detailed surround-soundscape. This soundscape is composed to include the users’ own idiosyncratic anxiety triggers as a form of habituation, and to provoke psychological catharsis, as a non-verbal, visceral and enveloping exposure. To accurately pinpoint the most effective sounds and to optimally compose the soundscape we will monitor the participants’ physiological responses such as electroencephalography, respiration, electromyography, and heart rate during exposure. We hypothesize that such physiologically optimized sensory landscapes will aid the development of future immersive therapies for various psychological conditions, Sound is a major trigger of anxiety, and auditory hypersensitivity is an extremely problematic symptom. Exposure to stress-inducing sounds can free anxiety sufferers from entrenched avoidance behaviors, teaching physiological coping strategies and encouraging resolution of the psychological issues agitated by the sound

Towards a Framework for Capturing and Distributing Rich Interactive Human Digital Memories

The area of human digital memories has placed considerable focus on documenting the things we do, the places we visit and the thoughts we think. Rather than sharing important events face–to–face, i.e. by watching home videos together or looking through photo albums, people tend to share their memories with each other through emails or text messages, or by posting them online. The difficulty is that the vast amounts of data we collect are often difficult to access and less meaningful to us over time. The challenge is to structure human digital memories in a way that can be easily distributed and recollected at different time periods in our lives. More specifically, the collection and organisation of memory-related information (images, video, physiological data and so on) needs to occur using ubiquitous ad hoc services, prevalent within the environments we occupy. This is likely to happen without us necessarily being aware that memories are being created. This will remove the need to manage the growing number of information sources that require conventional tools to achieve this, for example, a camera to take stills and video. This paper posits a new and novel idea that builds on the nomadic nature of people, ubiquitous computing, context awareness, physiological computing, semantic annotation and ad hoc networking that will allow rich interactive digital memories to be created amongst individuals and their environments that are unobtrusive to individuals

TOBE: Tangible Out-of-Body Experience

We propose a toolkit for creating Tangible Out-of-Body Experiences: exposing the inner states of users using physiological signals such as heart rate or brain activity. Tobe can take the form of a tangible avatar displaying live physiological readings to reflect on ourselves and others. Such a toolkit could be used by researchers and designers to create a multitude of potential tangible applications, including (but not limited to) educational tools about Science Technologies Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and cognitive science, medical applications or entertainment and social experiences with one or several users or Tobes involved. Through a co-design approach, we investigated how everyday people picture their physiology and we validated the acceptability of Tobe in a scientific museum. We also give a practical example where two users relax together, with insights on how Tobe helped them to synchronize their signals and share a moment

Memory Manipulations in Extended Reality

Human memory has notable limitations (e.g., forgetting) which have necessitated a variety of memory aids (e.g., calendars). As we grow closer to mass adoption of everyday Extended Reality (XR), which is frequently leveraging perceptual limitations (e.g., redirected walking), it becomes pertinent to consider how XR could leverage memory limitations (forgetting, distorting, persistence) to induce memory manipulations. As memories highly impact our self-perception, social interactions, and behaviors, there is a pressing need to understand XR Memory Manipulations (XRMMs). We ran three speculative design workshops (n=12), with XR and memory researchers creating 48 XRMM scenarios. Through thematic analysis, we define XRMMs, present a framework of their core components and reveal three classes (at encoding, pre-retrieval, at retrieval). Each class differs in terms of technology (AR, VR) and impact on memory (influencing quality of memories, inducing forgetting, distorting memories). We raise ethical concerns and discuss opportunities of perceptual and memory manipulations in XR

The role of context in human memory augmentation

Technology has always had a direct impact on what humans remember. In the era of smartphones and wearable devices, people easily capture on a daily basis information and videos, which can help them remember past experiences and attained knowledge, or simply evoke memories for reminiscing. The increasing use of such ubiquitous devices and technologies produces a sheer volume of pictures and videos that, in combination with additional contextual information, could potentially significantly improve one’s ability to recall a past experience and prior knowledge. Calendar entries, application use logs, social media posts, and activity logs comprise only a few examples of such potentially memory-supportive additional information. This work explores how such memory-supportive information can be collected, filtered, and eventually utilized, for generating memory cues, fragments of past experience or prior knowledge, purposed for triggering one’s memory recall. In this thesis, we showcase how we leverage modern ubiquitous technologies as a vessel for transferring established psychological methods from the lab into the real world, for significantly and measurably augmenting human memory recall in a diverse set of often challenging contexts. We combine experimental evidence garnered from numerous field and lab studies, with knowledge amassed from an extensive literature review, for substantially informing the design and development of future pervasive memory augmentation systems. Ultimately, this work contributes to the fundamental understanding of human memory and how today’s modern technologies can be actuated for augmenting it

Eyewear Computing \u2013 Augmenting the Human with Head-Mounted Wearable Assistants

The seminar was composed of workshops and tutorials on head-mounted eye tracking, egocentric vision, optics, and head-mounted displays. The seminar welcomed 30 academic and industry researchers from Europe, the US, and Asia with a diverse background, including wearable and ubiquitous computing, computer vision, developmental psychology, optics, and human-computer interaction. In contrast to several previous Dagstuhl seminars, we used an ignite talk format to reduce the time of talks to one half-day and to leave the rest of the week for hands-on sessions, group work, general discussions, and socialising. The key results of this seminar are 1) the identification of key research challenges and summaries of breakout groups on multimodal eyewear computing, egocentric vision, security and privacy issues, skill augmentation and task guidance, eyewear computing for gaming, as well as prototyping of VR applications, 2) a list of datasets and research tools for eyewear computing, 3) three small-scale datasets recorded during the seminar, 4) an article in ACM Interactions entitled \u201cEyewear Computers for Human-Computer Interaction\u201d, as well as 5) two follow-up workshops on \u201cEgocentric Perception, Interaction, and Computing\u201d at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) as well as \u201cEyewear Computing\u201d at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp)

Exploiting linked data to create rich human digital memories

Memories are an important aspect of a person's life and experiences. The area of human digital memories focuses on encapsulating this phenomenon, in a digital format, over a lifetime. Through the proliferation of ubiquitous devices, both people and the surrounding environment are generating a phenomenal amount of data. With all of this disjointed information available, successfully searching it and bringing it together, to form a human digital memory, is a challenge. This is especially true when a lifetime of data is being examined. Linked Data provides an ideal, and novel, solution for overcoming this challenge, where a variety of data sources can be drawn upon to capture detailed information surrounding a given event. Memories, created in this way, contain vivid structures and varied data sources, which emerge through the semantic clustering of content and other memories. This paper presents DigMem, a platform for creating human digital memories, based on device-specific services and the user's current environment. In this way, information is semantically structured to create temporal "memory boxes" for human experiences. A working prototype has been successfully developed, which demonstrates the approach. In order to evaluate the applicability of the system a number of experiments have been undertaken. These have been successful in creating human digital memories and illustrating how a user can be monitored in both indoor and outdoor environments. Furthermore, the user's heartbeat information is analysed to determine his or her heart rate. This has been achieved with the development of a QRS Complex detection algorithm and heart rate calculation method. These methods process collected electrocardiography (ECG) information to discern the heart rate of the user

Security and Privacy Implications of Pervasive Memory Augmentation

Pervasive computing is beginning to offer the potential to rethink and redefine how technology can support human memory augmentation. For example, the emergence of widespread pervasive sensing, personal recording technologies, and systems for the quantified self are creating an environment in which it's possible to capture fine-grained traces of many aspects of human activity. Contemporary psychology theories suggest that these traces can then be used to manipulate our ability to recall - to both reinforce and attenuate human memories. Here, the authors consider the privacy and security implications of using pervasive computing to augment human memory. They describe a number of scenarios, outline the key architectural building blocks, and identify entirely new types of security and privacy threats-namely, those related to data security (experience provenance), data management (establishing new paradigms for digital memory ownership), data integrity (memory attenuation and recall-induced forgetting), and bystander privacy. Together, these threats present compelling research challenges for the pervasive computing research community. This article is part of a special issue on privacy and security