Timeline

The previous window of the prototype concentrated on the location of each event to support lifelogging users to search, display and create cues for their memory. This window also has the same goal, but it focuses on time instead of location. The window is designed as a table which contains (24) columns and (6) rows as shown in Figure 5.7. Each column represents an hour, beginning at 08:00 am and ending at 07:00 am the next day. Each row represents only one activity. There are small red vertical lines to indicate there is some activities captured at that time, and to support the users in making a complete image of the whole day in just few seconds. This method was designed to enable the users to watch one day’s activities in few seconds. In addition, this was to support them in linking and remembering many activities that happened on that day, even actions that were not captured by any of the devices. I believe that presenting all lifelogging data at one time could assist a lifelogger to relive their past experiences.

Chapter 5 – First Prototype 100 In this window I attempted to display, visually, all logged data at once on a timeline to allow users to create more values cues that are able to stimulate and trigger different memories and to retrieve as much detailed information as possible.

Activities are displayed when users hover over individual waypoints and users can display and watch all of their activities by clicking on a specific hour during a selected day. They can access their timestamped activities and identify their actions during different parts of the day (e.g. Morning, afternoon, or evening).

The user interface is written in C sharp and Windows Presentation Foundation “WPF”. During the time of designing the user interface I continued capturing my personal data and use it to test, fix, and redesign the interface.

5.4 Exploratory study

As illustrated in the first chapter, the thesis aims to explore how different types of data collection could support people to create effective and valuable cues to augment their memory. In response to the great amount of data collected through lifelogging, this method could support the elimination of redundant data or identify new data and metadata.

Chapter 5 – First Prototype 101

I believe that both sociability and enjoyment are cornerstones of the lifelogging experiments, participants should take pleasure in collecting their data and employ the user interface to search, browse, and respond to visual cues. There is little previous experimental research to examine what data could be collected for lifelogging technology or to measure how such data could stimulate and augment human memory to generate appropriate cues for the purpose of enhancing, and supporting human memory these are restricted to a small number of clinical studies (e.g. Hodges et al., 2006; Lee & Dey, 2008; Lee & Dey, 2007)

I believe that, the new experimental design must examine two phenomena participants’ behaviour and their interactions. Participants must have natural or semi- natural behaviour whilst collecting their data and at the retrieval process. The experiment involved a natural group of participants to collect data from their natural everyday life environment.

5.4.1 Method

This study was conducted under two conditions that incorporated different ways of using lifelogging technology. In one condition participants used only their Organic Memory refers to the use of “non-augmented memory” to recall past life experience”.In the other, participants used the prototype interface to search, explore and create their visually appropriate cues to stimulate their memory to retrieve their past actions and events.

5.4.1.1 Participants

Three participants took part in the study, two of them male and one female. The mean age was 37.3 years. None of them had prior experience of using the CatCam or Nokia phone GPS, nor any related work with lifelogging. The two males are PhD students at Newcastle University, one of them is a computer science student and the other a chemical engineering student, and the female participant is the researcher’s wife. She is a homemaker. She has been chosen as a participant for many reasons. Her data would be distinctly different from the others because almost all of her data would be captured and collected at home and that means it would include different actions and activities such as childcare, preparing food, watching TV, family and friends phone calls and activities on the computer (surfing the web, reading emails, Facebook, and others).

Chapter 5 – First Prototype 102 Whereas the students activities may involve more travel outdoors as well as lectures and studying. In addition, using her data would demonstrate more clue of many significant issues such as people behaviour during collecting their data, time they prefer to do that, and to be aware of any difficulty that may be appearing or they face while using the devices. Furthermore, privacy concerns are one reason for selecting her as a participant; being close and working together on her data would support me to better understand the significance of many things that she might mention and this could be very useful at the evaluation stage.

I believe that capturing activities at home could support people in creating valuable cues for their memory and to retrieve details such as how they spend their time at home, how they behave and even to monitor their diet plan. Thus, this is another context where I need to examine the effectiveness and the necessity of lifelogging. This could help me to introduce and argue that it is evident that new lifelogging technology is needed, for both indoors and outdoors as each one complements the other. Face-To-Face (FTF) observation interviews were conducted twice with all participants. Two of them took place at Culture Lab, Newcastle University, and the other interview was at a participant’s home. The average time of the interviews was approximately 90 minutes. All interviews were recorded with the permission of the interviewees.

5.4.1.2 Procedure

This study was split into two stages. In the first stage participants were asked to use the proposed lifelogging capture tools to collect data from their everyday environment. The second stage focused on how to make that data available and meaningful for the users to display and search, and support them to generate interactive cues that enable them to stimulate their memory and assist them to retrieve more details of past events. At the former stage, I asked each participant to use lifelogging tools to collect data continuously for three weeks. I asked them to wear the “CatCam” camera to capture photos and turn on the GPS on the mobile phone to capture location information data for at least ten hours a day. In addition, I asked their permission to install two software programs on their personal computers, one of them to capture their computer screen and the other to download and archive their sent and opened emails passively. With regards to the privacy and security concerns, each participant’s data and metadata were archived and saved on their personal computers and protected by a password. The second stage of the study focused on the designing and building of a new user interface to visually

Chapter 5 – First Prototype 103 present participant’s data and that was able to support them in remembering details of their past experiences.

After approximately two months of collecting their data, participants were invited to attend two face-to-face observation interview sessions to test their ability of remembering some events from their logged days, first by relying on their organic memory and second by using the memory aid of the prototype user interface. In the former, participants were asked many open ended questions related to the actions and events of their logged data. I asked them to take their time and describe the details as much as they could to answer memory questions. The average time of these sessions was approximately 30 minutes. The latter session was divided again into two sessions, a training session and a direct observation session. In the former I introduced and explained, in detail, how to use each of the prototypes functions. In addition, I asked the participant to practice for a few minutes to make sure that they could become familiar with the interface. Next, I tested their familiarity and ability of using the prototype by asking them some training questions. My main goal for this task was to ensure that they could confidently access, locate and use all of their data as planned in the experiment. The average time of these sessions was approximately 20 minutes.

In the direct observation session, participants were ready to use the prototype interface confidently to search, display and create interactive visual cues. To make sure, I asked participants to use the prototype and answer a number of memory questions relating to a specific but typical event such as asking about lunch on particular days of . Examples of questions include Where did you go? What did you do? Who did you meet? With whom did you have lunch? What was the food? What were the topics of conversation? I asked them about news they received by email, SMSs or phone calls. All the questions I asked were open ended questions and participants were as long as they liked to answer the questions. These questions were typical of those used in prior studies of lifelogging (Sellen et al., 2007); (Kalnikaite et al., 2010). I asked the same questions for many different dates and times. The average time of these sessions was approximately 40 minutes. I believe that this method supported me in investigating participants’ memory and allow me to track, monitor and investigate their ability to use the prototype interface to retrieve their past actions and events. In addition, facilitate the evaluation of their interactions and behaviour as well.

Chapter 5 – First Prototype 104 In both sessions I used four ways to record the session for later analysis. A log file was used to capture participants’ activities and store them as text which was describing each action performed by the participants on the prototype interface. In addition, the SnagIt software was employed to record their computer screen. My motivation for this was to monitor, track, and follow the participants’ navigation between their data to assess how they used the interface to create their cues. Furthermore, video was used to capture participants faces to monitor and understand their verbal and nonverbal actions and track their hands, body and legs movements. I consider that these movements would enrich the meaning of the data corpus and, therefore, my understanding. Moreover, I captured images of participants’ computer screens every five second and used them as landmarks to follow the participants’ navigation and to monitor activity.

After each interview the interview data was transcribed in details. For example, conversation including laughter or saying sounds for instance, “mmm” or “yeah” or any other nonverbal sounds such as gesture and face or leg monument were transcribed and analysis.

5.4.2 Data Analysis

The interviews were transcribed; recorded in written format as a “full script” and then I used grounded theory to code and process the full script. I followed two types of coding: Open coding and Axial coding as identified by Strauss and Corbin (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). I utilised the former to code or label words and phrases by identifying, naming, categorizing and describing event found in the full script. The transcripts were then organised into themes, categories and examples to allow reoccurring topics or themes to emerge. The latter type “Axial Coding” was adapted to categories via a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning. In this way I created themes by grouping codes or labels to words and phrases.