Ernesto Ramirez

April 27, 2013

Lifelogging is somewhat of a hot topic these days. With the soft release of Google Glass, the crowdfunding success of personal logging cameras like Memoto, and the release of numerous technology-enabled auto diaries it should be no surprise that Lifelogging is a one of the core themes of our upcoming Quantified Self Europe Conference. We’re looking forward to collaboratively exploring how lifelogging fits into our personal and social contexts and we’re excited to welcome an excellent group of speakers on this topic.

Cathal Gurrin is a lecturer at the School of Computing, at Dublin City University, Ireland and he is an investigator at the CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technologies. Cathal is really a ‘hands-on’ researcher, so since June 2006, he has ‘lived his research’ and worn various sensing devices during waking hours. He has amassed a huge archive of 14 million wearable camera photos, weeks of video, sound samples and various other sensors such as location, movement, and nearby people. His research team is exploring how they can develop quantified self and lifelogging technologies that can have positive benefits in the real-world, with an initial focus on personalised healthcare and digital diaries.

One example of this work is the ‘Colour of Life’ wall. The Colour of Life wall is a touchscreen visualisation that plots a two dimensional view of a person’s life experience, in terms of colours encountered (imagine a 1 pixel camera), on a large video display wall. It is captured by wearable cameras configured to take about 2 photos per minute. The interface allows clustering of life events across weeks, months or even years. The colours displayed have a unique meaning to the camera wearer, for example, at a glance at the wall can show time periods when the wearer spent too long in the office or driving to work.

We’re excited to have Cathal at the conference where he will be sharing what he has learned during the last seven years of his personal lifelogging experiment. He will also show some of the new technologies his team are working on and will share his understanding of the likely potential pathways that this work of lifelogging will need to take in order to reach widespread use.

The Quantified Self European Conference will be held in Amsterdam on May 11th & 12th. Registration is now open. As with all our conferences our speakers are members of the community. We hope to see you there!