Collecting Shared Experiences through Lifelogging: Lessons Learned

The emergence of widespread pervasive sensing, personal recording technologies, and systems for the quantified self are creating an environment in which one can capture fine-grained activity traces. Such traces have wide applicability in domains such as human memory augmentation, behavior change, and healthcare. However, obtaining these traces for research is nontrivial, especially those containing photographs of everyday activities. To source data for their own work, the authors created an experimental setup in which they collected detailed traces of a group of researchers over 2.75 days. They share their experiences of this process and present a series of lessons learned for other members of the research community conducting similar studies.