Tools for Personal Data Collection

NotesNovember 2, 2012

Things I want to track

• Food and drink I consume• Stress Level• Ambient sound recordings with transcriptions• General noise level around me at all times• Ambient photo/video recording• What people I am with at any given time• Who I've communicated with each day

Things I want to track

• Biking – Strava, Runkeeper, Infer from GPS data• Emotion tracking – from text posts on Twitter,

Facebook, etc• Emotion tracking – explicit – emoome• Ambient light levels and color temperature –

circadian rhythm analysis– Philips wifi light bulb– Flux mac app

• Track what I’m watching/listening to– Apple TV, Netflix, Video games– FM radio, Soundhound

Things I want to track

• Medical records – connect to mood, food consumption

• Spending – credit cards– Many memories encoded into the transaction

history

Friction

• Acquisition - Data collection• Preservation - How do you connect two

sources together• Access - How do you analyze the data and get

meaning out of it• How do you manage sharing information

Interfaces

• What would the front-end look like to view the raw data?

• Graphs, photos• What do I want to know about the data?• Social taboo – weight, taboo, health care– What is the benefit of it not being a taboo?

Data Formats

• Collect data in points of time• Stream data

OAIS

Data Preservation

• Keep the original data– What media is it on?– What format is it in?

• Make versions of it accessible – Screenshots– Plain text

• Conversion vs Emulation

Data Collection Issues

• Hard to keep track of where all the data is• Find an app that specializes in tracking one

thing, but then would forget about the app that tracks your water intake

@skjonas• For passive tracking, uses individual apps• For manually entering things, uses Bento

(made by Filemaker), a general database app