Context-sensitive memory augmentation using recorded everyday life data

The recent rise of life-logging technologies and wearable computing gadgets allows the recording of data from our daily lives. Experiences make people what they are. The omnipresent tracking devices and their sensors experience the same things as their owners, thus creating e-memories and surrogate brains. Such life-logs or e-memories contain everything we can sense or our environment senses, like images, heart rates or locations. With this increase of digital personal data we explore challenges and solutions how to use this vast amount of data with the goal to support human memory. To do this, we used a user-centered approach. In the first step we conducted a series of focus groups and an online survey with the goal of understanding the requirements of life-logging tools. The results of the requirement analysis led to the development of a holistic concept of a digital life assistant. Our initial prototype leverages life-log data in form of a smart alarm clock, which provides an automatic morning briefing about the past and the upcoming day via audio and bedside projection. The prototype was finally evaluated in the field in a small-scale pilot study with the focus on the different presentation modes.Die aktuelle Entwicklung von Life-Logging-Technologien und tragbaren Computern ermöglicht die Aufzeichnung von Daten aus dem täglichen Leben. Erfahrungen machen Menschen zu dem was sie sind. Die allgegenwärtigen Aufnahmegeräte erleben dasselbe, wie ihre Besitzer und schaffen damit elektronische Erinnerungen und einen stellvertretenden Verstand. Diese Life-Logs oder elektronischen Erinnerungen beinhalten alles was deren Besitzer oder deren Umgebungen wahrnehmen, wie z. B. Bilder, Herzfrequenzen oder Standorte. Mit diesem Anstieg von digitalen persönlichen Daten erforschen wir Herausforderungen und Lösungen, wie diese gewaltige Datenmenge nutzbar gemacht und das menschliche Gedächtnis unterstützt werden kann. Daher haben wir einen nutzerorientierten Ansatz gewählt. Im ersten Schritt haben wir eine Serie von Fokusgruppen und eine Online-Umfrage durchgeführt, um die Anforderungen von Life-Logging Werkzeugen zu verstehen. Das Ergebnis der Anforderungsanalyse führte zu der Entwicklung eines ganzheitlichen Konzepts eines digitalen persönlichen Assistentens. Unser initialer Prototyp macht sich Life-Logging-Daten in Form eines intelligenten Weckers zu Nutze. Der Assistent bereitet automatisiert ein morgendliches Briefing über die Vergangenheit und den bevorstehenden Tag vor und präsentiert dieses mittels Sprache und einer bettseitigen Projektion. Schließlich wurde der Prototyp im praktischen Einsatz in einer kleinen Pilotstudie mit dem Fokus auf die verschiedenen Präsentationsmodi untersucht

Digital life stories: Semi-automatic (auto)biographies within lifelog collections

Our life stories enable us to reflect upon and share our personal histories. Through emerging digital technologies the possibility of collecting life experiences digitally is increasingly feasible; consequently so is the potential to create a digital counterpart to our personal narratives. In this work, lifelogging tools are used to collect digital artifacts continuously and passively throughout our day. These include images, documents, emails and webpages accessed; texts messages and mobile activity. This range of data when brought together is known as a lifelog. Given the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections, it is clear that there are significant challenges to be addressed in order to achieve coherent and meaningful digital narratives of our events from our life histories. This work investigates the construction of personal digital narratives from lifelog collections. It examines the underlying questions, issues and challenges relating to construction of personal digital narratives from lifelogs. Fundamentally, it addresses how to organize and transform data sampled from an individual’s day-to-day activities into a coherent narrative account. This enquiry is enabled by three 20-month long-term lifelogs collected by participants and produces a narrative system which enables the semi-automatic construction of digital stories from lifelog content. Inspired by probative studies conducted into current practices of curation, from which a set of fundamental requirements are established, this solution employs a 2-dimensional spatial framework for storytelling. It delivers integrated support for the structuring of lifelog content and its distillation into storyform through information retrieval approaches. We describe and contribute flexible algorithmic approaches to achieve both. Finally, this research inquiry yields qualitative and quantitative insights into such digital narratives and their generation, composition and construction. The opportunities for such personal narrative accounts to enable recollection, reminiscence and reflection with the collection owners are established and its benefit in sharing past personal experience experiences is outlined. Finally, in a novel investigation with motivated third parties we demonstrate the opportunities such narrative accounts may have beyond the scope of the collection owner in: personal, societal and cultural explorations, artistic endeavours and as a generational heirloom