A user-study examining visualization of lifelogs

With continuous advances in the pervasive sensing and lifelogging technologies for the quantified self, users now can record their daily life activities automatically and seamlessly. In the existing lifelogging research, visualization techniques for presenting the lifelogs and evaluating the effectiveness of such techniques from a lifelogger's perspective has not been adequately studied. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of four distinct visualization techniques for exploring the lifelogs, which were collected by 22 lifeloggers who volunteered to use a wearable camera and a GPS device simultaneously, for a period of 3 days. Based on a user study with these 22 lifeloggers, which required them to browse through their personal lifelogs, we seek to identify the most effective visualization technique. Our results suggest various ways to augment and improve the visualization of personal lifelogs to enrich the quality of user experience and making lifelogging tools more engaging. We also propose a new visualization feature-drill-down approach with details-on-demand, to make the lifelogging visualization process more meaningful and informative to the lifeloggers.