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The Story of Our Lives From Sensors to Stories in Self-monitoring Systems. Dana Pavel , Vic Callaghan, Anind K. Dey (CMU), Francisco Sepulveda, Michael Gardner School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering University of Essex 12 September 2012. Outline.
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The Story of Our LivesFrom Sensors to Stories in Self-monitoring Systems Dana Pavel, Vic Callaghan, Anind K. Dey (CMU), Francisco Sepulveda, Michael Gardner School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering University of Essex 12 September 2012
Outline • Motivation and (current) goals • MyRoR system • Summary of experiments
MyRoR Background • Lifestyle management is an important area for individuals and societies • Most current solutions focus on showing what and less why it happened • End users are often left out of the loop
Main goals • Provide a more comprehensive picture of user lives • Better understand what information people find interesting • Create better correlations and visualisationscapable to capture such diverse information • Involve the user in all aspects: from information gathering to processing to usage
Towards a comprehensive user context Social context (communication, identity) Availability context (people or resource) Signal strength (phone) Event button (user pressed) Battery level (phone) Application context ECG/Heart rate Keystrokes Devices around (BT, WLAN-based) Mental context (interest, focus, etc.) Emotional context URLs visited Environmental noise level 3-axis accelerometer Email data Calendar event Temporal context (absolute, relative, duration) Location (GPS, cell ID, country code, WLAN based) Physical context (position, direction, distance, speed, proximity) Time Activity context
Main challenges • Synchronizing input devices • Different formats for input data • Correlating and interpreting data • Evolving platform in time (over different situations, over life changes) • Presenting information to end users • Detailed vs. abstract • Interactive • Evolving
Desktop interface in MyRoR Abstract, story-based visualisations Detailed visualisations Main interface
MyRoR stories Why: • Stories are most natural ways of “representing” information • Stories can bring together different types of recorded information in a fun, concise and engaging way • Stories require a focus on what is important (“collection of meaningful events” – Kevin M. Brooks) How: • MyRoR stories combine various media created based on interpreting available user information • Take into account user annotations One main challenge: • What is ‘meaningful’?
Story creation process MyRoR DB Rule Engine/KBs
Example: An event within a story Location-based background Icon version Text version Time
Experiments and studies • Online survey – 38 participants • Main focus: • Explore attitudes towards self-reflection • Test if such system is perceived as useful • Explore issues around story creation and customisation • http://ieg.essex.ac.uk/myror/survey/intro.php • Hands-on experiments – 6 participants • Main focus: • Importance of information • Story creation and sharing • Interactions with the system
Results from survey (1/2) • Q1: Do you often think back about what happened during the day? • Q2: Do you think about what triggered a certain emotion or behaviour? • Q3: Do you usually propose any change based on self-reflection?
Results from survey (2/2) • Q5: Do you use (or have used) any self-monitoring systems (e.g., fitness-related)? Q6: Would you find useful having a system as presented in the scenario? • Q7: If you were to be using such a system would you like to be able to see a story generated based on your activity data?
Quick Learnings (1/2) • It’s good to have more contextual information as it helps remember, understand and reflect on what happened • The usefulness of information cannot be detached from the context it was recorded in • We cannot create lifestyle management systems that only focus on a certain type of information • Need to create systems that can dynamically change the importance of information based on user, situations and evolve over time • Giving people the means to create annotations yields interesting results! • Difference between implicit vs. explicit meaning • Annotations as means for self-reflection • Need better ways for annotating (e.g., watch, pendant?)
Quick Learnings(2/2) • The story-based multi-media concept was preferred over graphs as a quick view into recorded data • Combine narrative with graphic • Customization is desired but should not take too long • Background picture is important • Stories should be able to change and evolve • Change focus, add new information • Fun way of sharing recorded information • Needs means to adapt stories for sharing
Future… • Further develop the stories • Dynamic creation based on changing information, interest and audience • Apply system to various areas • E.g., health area (look into embedding various psychological/behavioural/persuasive models)
Thank you! Contact info: dmpave@essex.ac.uk Online survey: http://ieg.essex.ac.uk/myror/survey/intro.php Work is performed under PAL project: http://palproject.org.uk
Examples of information processing
Remote access to system (phone-blog) Protected access to collected information Story playing Updating system with data (photos, blog entries, documents)
Visualisations in self-monitoring systems From Affective Diary work at SICS (Stahl, Hook, etc.) From Garmin software Using Google Visualizations
Own notes Calendar-based interface Visualisationsfor information collected and derived stored in the personal database Information collected on demand from remote servers Daily story
Determining “meaningful” events Based on user-based actions/annotations • Based on more interesting context data • E.g., calls/messages, changes in location, heart rate • Allowing end user to select interesting information • ! Need to be keep the story short!
PAL project • This work is part of the PAL project (http://palproject.org.uk), funded by EPSRC and TSB • PAL looks at self-monitoring solutions as part of future healthcare scenarios • PAL also includes aspects of security and privacy in the context of various usages of recorded personal data