MyLifeBits and SenseCam

Goals: understanding the effort to digitize a lifetime of legacy content and to eliminate paper as a permanent storage medium. Collecting images throughout the day to help those who need memory aid.

Problem : amounts of personal data one collects per day can occupy large amounts of space, so how can one improve the ability to organize, search, annotate and use content; and how can one obtain a unified database with personal information.

Approach:

MyLifeBits: they created and organized a large database with all potential information and looked at ways to organize it. They created small interfaces to look at how that data could be put together and made accessible to people. The ideas behind this are based on Bush’s memex.

There is the belief that if you can capture as much data as possible, one can gain more insight about certain dates. This is particularly important because one regrets missing data, not the excess of it. This data has to be taken automatically.

Some Thoughts:

I think this is far enough from my research area to take elements from it, however, I do think it gave me a deeper understanding of what personal informatics is trying to do. On one hand I can see why it’s interesting to look at data from the past and learning something out of it, it might be cool to see what temperature it was outside while I was at a party or how the weather can influence our daily activities. I find it particularly interesting how one can look at the sensecam for example, to save and share memorable moments, hence why I proposed a project based on this before: I sometimes want to be able to relive moments, and feel the way I felt at a certain time, but I only want to take the relevant ones and also be able to share them, and see others’ experiences.

However, it seems like personal informatics has more of a focus on things where one can learn look back and learn from, particularly aspects like health and fitness. This is probably what I don’t like about PI in a personal level (oddly enough, I’m putting this up in a response log). Although I love working out and I miss doing things such as dancing (ever since I got injured), I know my SED only allows me to eat less than 10 different things… and it’s definitely not something I want to see. There’s also data that I think might be too random, such as my phone bill. But I do find interesting to look at data such as my phone calls, or people I talked to throughout the day (the social part). I think this is why I’m at a split as to what I like vs. don’t like about personal informatics.