Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory Using the SenseCam

Human memory is a dynamic system that makes accessible certain memories of events based on a hierarchy of information, arguably driven by personal significance. Not all events are remembered, but those that are tend to be more psychologically relevant. In contrast, lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one's life in digital form without loss of information. In this article we share our experiences in designing computer-based solutions to assist people review their visual lifelogs and address this contrast. The technical basis for our work is automatically segmenting visual lifelogs into events, allowing event similarity and event importance to be computed, ideas that are motivated by cognitive science considerations of how human memory works and can be assisted. Our work has been based on visual lifelogs gathered by dozens of people, some of them with collections spanning multiple years. In this review article we summarize a series of studies that have led to the development of a browser that is based on human memory systems and discuss the inherent tension in storing large amounts of data but making the most relevant material the most accessible

Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory using the sensecam

Human memory is a dynamic system that makes accessible certain memories of events based on a hierarchy of information, arguably driven by personal significance. Not all events are remembered, but those that are tend to be more psychologically relevant. In contrast, lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one's life in digital form without loss of information. In this article we share our experiences in designing computer-based solutions to assist people review their visual lifelogs and address this contrast. The technical basis for our work is automatically segmenting visual lifelogs into events, allowing event similarity and event importance to be computed, ideas that are motivated by cognitive science considerations of how human memory works and can be assisted. Our work has been based on visual lifelogs gathered by dozens of people, some of them with collections spanning multiple years. In this review article we summarize a series of studies that have led to the development of a browser that is based on human memory systems and discuss the inherent tension in storing large amounts of data but making the most relevant material the most accessible

Distributed selves: Personal identity and extended memory systems

This paper explores the implications of extended and distributed cognition theory for our notions of personal identity. On an extended and distributed approach to cognition, external information is under certain conditions constitutive of memory. On a narrative approach to personal identity, autobiographical memory is constitutive of our diachronic self. In this paper, I bring these two approaches together and argue that external information can be constitutive of one’s autobiographical memory and thus also of one’s diachronic self. To develop this claim, I draw on recent empirical work in human-computer interaction, looking at lifelogging technologies in both healthcare and everyday contexts. I argue that personal identity can neither be reduced to psychological structures instantiated by the brain nor by biological structures instantiated by the organism, but should be seen as an environmentally-distributed and relational construct. In other words, the complex web of cognitive relations we develop and maintain with other people and technological artifacts partly determines our self. This view has conceptual, methodological, and normative implications: we should broaden our concepts of the self as to include social and artifactual structures, focus on external memory systems in the (empirical) study of personal identity, and not interfere with people’s distributed minds and selves

Guidelines for the presentation and visualisation of lifelog content

Lifelogs offer rich voluminous sources of personal and social data for which visualisation is ideally suited to providing access, overview, and navigation. We explore through examples of our visualisation work within the domain of lifelogging the major axes on which lifelogs operate, and therefore, on which their visualisations should be contingent. We also explore the concept of ‘events’ as a way to significantly reduce the complexity of the lifelog for presentation and make it more human-oriented. Finally we present some guidelines and goals which should be considered when designing presentation modes for lifelog conten

Information access tasks and evaluation for personal lifelogs

Emerging personal lifelog (PL) collections contain permanent digital records of information associated with individuals’ daily lives. This can include materials such as emails received and sent, web content and other documents with which they have interacted, photographs, videos and music experienced passively or created, logs of phone calls and text messages, and also personal and contextual data such as location (e.g. via GPS sensors), persons and objects present (e.g. via Bluetooth) and physiological state (e.g. via biometric sensors). PLs can be collected by individuals over very extended periods, potentially running to many years. Such archives have many potential applications including helping individuals recover partial forgotten information, sharing experiences with friends or family, telling the story of one’s life, clinical applications for the memory impaired, and fundamental psychological investigations of memory. The Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) at Dublin City University is currently engaged in the collection and exploration of applications of large PLs. We are collecting rich archives of daily life including textual and visual materials, and contextual context data. An important part of this work is to consider how the effectiveness of our ideas can be measured in terms of metrics and experimental design. While these studies have considerable similarity with traditional evaluation activities in areas such as information retrieval and summarization, the characteristics of PLs mean that new challenges and questions emerge. We are currently exploring the issues through a series of pilot studies and questionnaires. Our initial results indicate that there are many research questions to be explored and that the relationships between personal memory, context and content for these tasks is complex and fascinating

An exploration of the utility of GSR in locating events from personal lifelogs for reflection

Digital personal lifelogs (PLs) enable many artifacts from a person’s life to be automatically stored in a digital archive. These data sets can contain a wealth of potentially valuable information describing events from an individual’s life. A key challenge for lifelog technologies is how to develop scenarios and applications which enable people to interact with these vast heterogeneous data sources in a meaningful way. One of the areas where individuals can gain from interacting with lifelog records of their life is in the process of self reflection. To date little attention has been given to applications which automatically extract content from lifelogs to support self reflection using lifelog content. One of the significant issues with reflection from lifelogs is discerning material which may be of interest in reflection from among the huge amount of available data. One way of determining the user’s engagement with their situation is measuring their biometric response associated with their arousal level. Specifically it is known that an individual’s galvanic skin response (GSR) can vary with their level of arousal. We hypothesize that situations of marked GSR variation are likely to be more significant for self reflection than other moments. We present an initial investigation, using 3 subjects’ lifelogs, of the utility of lifelog items with marked GSR for self reflection. Our results indicate that GSR records may serve as a good enabling technology for applications supporting self reflection and awareness

Exploring the technical challenges of large-scale lifelogging

Ambiently and automatically maintaining a lifelog is an activity that may help individuals track their lifestyle, learning, health and productivity. In this paper we motivate and discuss the technical challenges of developing real-world lifelogging solutions, based on seven years of experience. The gathering, organisation, retrieval and presentation challenges of large-scale lifelogging are dis- cussed and we show how this can be achieved and the benefits that may accrue

SenseCam: A new tool for memory rehabilitation?

The emergence of life-logging technologies has led neuropsychologist to focus on understanding how this new technology could help patients with memory disorders. Despite the growing number of studies using life-logging technologies, a theoretical framework supporting its effectiveness is lacking. This review focuses on the use of life-logging in the context of memory rehabilitation, particularly the use of SenseCam, a wearable camera allowing passive image capture. In our opinion, reviewing SenseCam images can be effective for memory rehabilitation only if it provides more than an assessment of prior occurrence in ways that reinstates previous thoughts, feelings and sensory information, thus stimulating recollection. Considering the fact that, in memory impairment, self-initiated processes are impaired, we propose that the environmental support hypothesis can explain the value of SenseCam for memory retrieval. Twenty-five research studies were selected for this review and despite the general acceptance of the value of SenseCam as a memory technique, only a small number of studies focused on recollection. We discuss the usability of this tool to improve episodic memory and in particular, recollectio

Extended mind and artifactual autobiographical memory

In this paper, I describe how artifacts and autobiographical memory are integrated into new systemic wholes, allowing us to remember our personal past in a more reliable and detailed manner. After discussing some empirical work on lifelogging technology, I elaborate on the dimension of autobiographical dependency, which is the degree to which we depend on an object to be able to remember a personal experience. When this dependency is strong, we integrate information in the embodied brain and in an object to reconstruct an autobiographical memory. In such cases, autobiographical memory is extended or distributed