learning and self-identity.
Remembering intentions. Another
type of activity concerns remembering
prospective events in one’s life (“
prospective memory”), as opposed to the
things that have happened in the past.
Our everyday activities require that
we constantly defer actions and plan
future activities; examples include remembering to run errands, take medication, and show up for appointments.
A careful analysis of the lifelogging
literature for proposed user value suggests a general focus on the processes
of recollection and retrieval, but these
benefits are usually implied rather
than explicit.
evaluation
Do lifelogging systems deliver these
benefits? One way to identify evidence of utility is through systematic evaluation (such as focused lab
studies and studies of longer-term
real-world use). However, such evaluations have yet to provide overwhelming evidence of effectiveness, and
extended usage studies show little impact outside research labs. Worse, few
lifelogging systems are in widespread
use, even within the research laboratories that developed them.
In practice, total-capture systems
have been used by only a small number
of people (often those with direct investment in the technology), and lifelogging infrastructures11, 12 are not in
widespread use. While Gordon Bell of
Microsoft2 and Steve Mann of the University of Toronto18 have both “lived
the vision” by recording many aspects
of their everyday lives, they are unusual
in the extreme extent of their engagement with lifelogging. Otherwise,
there are few instances of full-fledged
use of total capture.
More controlled system evaluations
are also not encouraging in terms of
demonstrable utility. The SenseCam
(see the figure), which captures a series
of still images based on movement and
changes in the intensity of light and
heat, has been shown to support the
recollection of everyday experience, as
well as retrieval of information about
past events. 23 However, the same study
showed that the capacity for these images to help people recollect their past
experience rapidly decreased after only
three months, casting doubt on whether such devices can support longer-term recollection.
Most evaluations described in the
literature have examined situation-
microsoft sensecam captures a series of still images triggered by changes in activity (such as movement) and includes sensors that capture other kinds of data (such as ambient light levels and temperature); courtesy microsoft Research cambridge.
specific capture systems. For example,
Filochat is an application that allows
users to access spoken information
from meetings via personal digital
notes. Both lab experiments and a
field trial at Hewlett-Packard Labs in
the early 1990s demonstrated Filochat’s superiority in supporting retrieval of meeting information compared with traditional techniques
(such as pen-and-paper notes and
Dictaphone recordings). An active
user group reported positive reactions
to the system because it allowed them
to generate accurate meeting minutes. Similar findings were reported in
other field studies of related meeting-capture technologies; see Whittaker et
al. 28 for a review. But despite such early
positive results, more recent research
should make us skeptical, suggesting
that records may be less useful than
we might first think. For example,
lecture recordings don’t significantly
improve student grades, 1 and evaluations of meeting-capture systems have
shown little uptake of sophisticated
records. 20
Other research confirms the view
that digital archives may be generally
less valuable than people would hope.
Even when—contrary to lifelogging
principles—we deliberately choose to
save digital memorabilia, we seldom
access them. Studies by Petrelli and
Whittaker19 in 2010 of digital family
memorabilia (such as photos, videos,
scanned images, and email) showed
that digital archives are rarely accessed. In the same study, when people
with large collections of digital memorabilia were asked to select objects
of mnemonic significance in their
homes, less than 2% of the objects they
reported were digital. 19 Other work has
found that users with collections of
thousands of digital photos never access the majority of them. 27
While this lack of interest in digital data doesn’t imply that all such
archives have little value, it raises
questions about their utility in remembering or reviewing the past. One might
surmise that we simply lack effective
techniques for accessing the archives.
However, most situation-specific capture systems for meetings and lectures
include sophisticated access tools
(such as multimedia search and bespoke browsing interfaces), suggesting