Life Logging
Last updated
Last updated
(movavi.io) by Evgeniya Dolina
How much do you know about yourself? How many of your daily events do you forget? Human memory is not very reliable, is it? For anyone who doesn’t want to miss anything from their everyday life, lifelogging is the way. Lifelogging is the collection of your life’s data using technical tools and services , and then analyzing them.
To do this, life loggers use devices that capture everything that happens around them, like smart glasses (Google Glass, Vuzix, EyeTap) or wearable cameras (Memoto, Microsoft SenceCam).
How Did It All Begin?
The first person to use the term “lifelogging” was Gordon Bell, an engineer at Microsoft Research. He started his experiment in 2001 and named it MyLifeBits. But the concept was invented much earlier. It was first described in 1945 by Vannevar Bush in an article titled “As We May Think”. It was about a device, Memex, that compressed and stored all of an individual’s books, records, and communications – an automated diary that acts as an extension to one’s memory. In fact, Gordon Bell, with his project, did an attempt to fulfill the same concept as Memeх.
A non-tech example is that of the Reverend Robert Shields, who manually recorded 25 years of his life in 5 minutes intervals. He left behind the longest diary ever written, with more than 35 million words. In 1981, Steve Mann became the first person to capture continuous physiological data along with a live video from a wearable camera that he designed and built himself.
What Lifelogging Is Like Now
Today, with smart wearable devices and lifelogging smartphone applications, you don’t need to write down every single thing that happens to you to log your life. And it’s not just about Google Glass or Memoto cameras, but also Apple Watch and heart rate monitors. But even with all those possibilities, lifelogging is now in decline. Gordon Bell has given up his blog, and another famous lifelogging experimenter, Chris Anderson, decided that tracking everything is pointless.
The opposite viewpoint was expressed by Stephen Wolfram, the longest-serving lifelogger of all. His position was that everyone will soon lifelog and use the information to improve their lives. Everyday tracking, indeed, can make life better when it comes to health and mindfulness. On the other hand, we don’t have the technology as yet which makes it easy and effortless enough for people to keep doing it. Now we have to use different apps and devices to get a complete picture but, once we have a device or software that delivers more benefits for less effort, lifelogging could become much more popular. And in this regard changes coming to the market are quite promising. Take, for example, the latest iterations of smartwatches or smart glasses, synchronizing your every move with your smartphone and creating a gigantic database about your life.
A good documentary for the future of lifelogging
Many of the problems and challenges of the lifelogging adoption blockers are solved in this paper.
Lifelogging is not yet popular because of the many complex challenges and variations of solutions specific to different data capturing. There is no indexing system efficient enough to process all that real-time data and structure it in a way where duplicates are removed in order to improve the storage capacity and where similarities are found and grouped together and in the same time is easy enough to use
Lifelogging touches more on a problem or recording a lot of the raw data of our lives, while the proposed technology of this paper comes on top of that and address the question on 'How can we organized the best the meaning and relation of all that raw data'' and 'How can we reconstruct our memories just by capturing bits of data' and 'how do we avoid the need of manually being involved in the logging of the data?'.