I was very privileged this week to be invited along to a talk by Dr Kieron O’Hara at the British Computer Society and I would like to share my interpretation, synopsis and thoughts on the talk . Dr Kieron O’Hara is a senior research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and a research fellow of the Web Science Research Initiative, currently on the LiveMemories project. He is the author of nine books and has also written extensively on British politics and political theory, and is a research fellow for the Centre for Policy Studies. His talk was based on a new craze still in its infancy called Lifelogging. The principle is very simple and many of us already do this to some extent with the use social media such as facebook, twitter and flickr but Lifelogging is possibly the next evolutionary step.

A long time ago Steve Mann started taking pictures of his life from his own perspective. A small (well not at first) device that is attached to his head, took pictures and video. A simpler version of this idea, the Microsoft SenseCam, has been used for research for a few years now, taking a picture every couple of minutes. Downloading the image set at the end of the day and replaying it back one by one shows a kind of movie of your day. Ok, so you get the concept, you have been taking pictures all day and maybe getting a few strange looks from people but you have your lifelog at the end of it.

Steve Mann's mobile device throughout the ages

So the big question is Why?

Throughout your day you take in an incredible amount of information through your eyes – but your attention is directed at one thing in particular (more often than not) and you miss a large amount of what happened in the other areas you did not have attention or focus on. reviewing the lifelog at the end of the day has been shown to help recapture this information, it is also reported to be used for:

• Memory and creativity
• An enhanced self incite
• Re-living your life-story
• Storing ‘accurate’ medical history
• Information management
• Digital Immortality

Dr Kieron O’Hara explained a great example of a research initiative focusing on  Alzheimer’s patients and the benefits of using lifelogging to help memory. The study, run by Emma Berry, contained patients who were taken for a significant event (e.g. a day out at the local zoo). Sometimes they were asked afterwards to record nothing about the day out. Sometimes they were asked to keep a diary of the day in a paperback book so that they could later reflect on the day’s events. On other occasions they were asked to carry the lifelogging tool (in this case the sense-cam). At intervals after the event the patients were asked to recall the events of the day, the results of which were measured and recorded. The first set of patient’s recall ability dwindled to 0% recall after a few weeks. The patients who were asked to keep a diary of events had a recall ability lasting into one or maybe two months. The patients who had the sense-cam had a recall that lasted upto and over 12 months.

Organisation & Contextual Information

Another application of lifelogging is the ability to contextualise life information. We look for important information (in our vast memory) through links of seemingly un-important data. Think about the last time you were asked “when did x happen last year” – you dont just pull the information out right away, you go through a process such as (if its anything like mine) Hmmm, it was around the same time as my birthday but before I went out for a meal with some friends, i was wearing a certain jacket because of someone commenting on it… etc etc and eventually you get to the answer.

We store all this information – Calendars, e-mail, text messages, bank statements, meal and clothes receipts, but no way of combining them all to get the best information out of them. Tim Burnes Lee has put some thought into this and developed a diagram, a kind of map to show how he sees the future of synchronisation and contextualisation of all of this information working.  Pulling information from different places to give context and meaning to all of the information combined.

Sir Tim Burnes Lee - association metro map

Sir Tim Burnes lee has a talk on this which includes some great explanation’s of how we he got to this map along with some other interesting concepts. Click here for the full slideshow titled “The process of designing things in a very large space”.

Examples of lifelogging

• Digital Lives – By the British Library
• MemoryShare – By the BBC
• MyLifeBits – By Microsoft

Security: Can you secure your own identity?

to be continued in the next post …