Re-thinking lifelogging : designing human-centric prosthetic memory devices.

Building Prosthetic Memory (PM) technology has been an active research area for the past few decades, with the primary aim in supporting Organic Memory (OM) in remembering everyday events and experiences. Through building and evaluating new PM tools, this thesis attempts to explore how and when PM tools are used to help OM in everyday memory tasks. The focus of this thesis is to investigate PM tools as an extension of, or a supplement to, OM and to understand why people choose to use PM as opposed to their OM to help them retrieve information. Further aims of this thesis are to investigate the role of Metamemory and social processes. Finally, the work aims to support Autobiographical memory through building new PM tools. The studies apply mixed experimental and naturalistic methods, and include 3 controlled lab studies and 3 field trials involving a total of 217 participants. Overall, there were 5 new PM devices built and evaluated in long-term and controlled contexts. Results obtained through lab studies suggest that PM and OM function in a synergetic relationship. In particular, use of PM increases when OM is particularly weak and this interaction is mediated by organic Metamemory processes. PM properties also have an influence - people prefer efficient over accurate PM devices. Furthermore, PM cues help in two ways: 1) at encoding to help focus OM; and 2) at retrieval to cue partially remembered information. Longer term studies also reveal that PM is not used to substitute for OM. Instead users prefer to use recordings to access specific parts of a lecture rather than listen to the whole thing. Such tools are extensively used by non-native speakers, although only native speakers' coursework benefits from usage. PM tools that support social summarisation demonstrate that people exploit social feedback and cues provided by other users and that these improve recall. IV Finally, evaluations of new autobiographical memory tools show that people upload mementos based on their importance. There is evidence for preference for mementos that are associated with other people and home. I conclude with a discussion of the design and theory implications of this work

FM radio: family interplay with sonic mementos

Digital mementos are increasingly problematic, as people acquire large amounts of digital belongings that are hard to access and often forgotten. Based on fieldwork with 10 families, we designed a new type of embodied digital memento, the FM Radio. It allows families to access and play sonic mementos of their previous holidays. We describe our underlying design motivation where recordings are presented as a series of channels on an old fashioned radio. User feedback suggests that the device met our design goals: being playful and intriguing, easy to use and social. It facilitated family interaction, and allowed ready access to mementos, thus sharing many of the properties of physical mementos that we intended to trigger

Passively recognising human activities through lifelogging

Lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one’s life in digital form. This includes visual lifelogging using wearable cameras such as the SenseCam and in recent years many interesting applications for this have emerged and are being actively researched. One of the most interesting of these, and possibly the most far-reaching, is using visual lifelogs as a memory prosthesis but there are also applications in job-specific activity recording, general lifestyle analysis and market analysis. In this work we describe a technique which allowed us to develop automatic classifiers for visual lifelogs to infer different lifestyle traits or characteristics. Their accuracy was validated on a set of 95 k manually annotated images and through one-on-one interviews with those who gathered the images. These automatic classifiers were then applied to a collection of over 3 million lifelog images collected by 33 individuals sporadically over a period of 3.5 years. From this collection we present a number of anecdotal observations to demonstrate the future potential of lifelogging to capture human behaviour. These anecdotes include: the eating habits of office workers; to the amount of time researchers spend outdoors through the year; to the observation that retired people in our study appear to spend quite a bit of time indoors eating with friends. We believe this work demonstrates the potential of lifelogging techniques to assist behavioural scientists in future

Activity River: Visualizing Planned and Logged Personal Activities for Reflection

We present Activity River, a personal visualization tool which enables individuals to plan, log, and reflect on their self-defined activities. We are interested in supporting this type of reflective practice as prior work has shown that reflection can help people plan and manage their time effectively. Hence, we designed Activity River based on five design goals (visualize historical and contextual data, facilitate comparison of goals and achievements, engage viewers with delightful visuals, support authorship, and enable flexible planning and logging) which we distilled from the Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction literature. To explore our approach's strengths and limitations, we conducted a qualitative study of Activity River using a role-playing method. Through this qualitative exploration, we illustrate how our participants envisioned using our visualization to perform dynamic and continuous reflection on their activities. We observed that they were able to assess their progress towards their plans and adapt to unforeseen circumstances using our tool.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, AVI '20, September 28-October 2, 2020, Salerno, Italy 2020 Association for Computing Machiner