Rewind

Abstract

Snapping photos or videos on a smartphone makes recording visual memories convenient, but what isn't captured may still be meaningful in retrospect. In this paper, digital mementos are automatically generated for participants using the Rewind system, which assists the recall of location-based minutiae. Rewind is a video-like medium describing people's daily excursions using a sequence of street-level images determined by self-tracked location data. The Rewinds are color-processed to reflect seasonal, time-of-day and weather characteristics. Through two user studies with a combined 40 users, Rewinds were shown to be used as memory artifacts, and are especially meaningful in the many situations when photos or videos are not available. The small cues in Rewinds evoke longer fragments of memory tied to nostalgic routines or significant events, and the sequence of images provide a first-person perspective of remembrance for users. While they are more generic and can possess inaccuracies, Rewinds give people anchors for memories that feel like their own that are used to craft a narrative for that day. Rewind strikes a balance between automatic logging and manually-curated memories by personalizing it in meaningful visuals and consolidating an otherwise overwhelming amount of data.

Mapping and Taking Stock of the Personal Informatics Literature

“…Deployment studies typically also involved interviews or surveys with participants. 47 publications (12%) incorporated lab studies (e.g., of a new tool for reflection [268,273,274], of a new data collection technique [130,292], as a data source for development of a clustering or recognition algorithm [63,126,199,292]) and 39 (10%) involved participatory design activities (e.g., providing participants artifacts or scenarios to inform design of future tools [25,115,165,301], co-creating tools with participants [140,178,245]). 37 empirical studies (9%) leveraged publicly-available data, such as videos of Quantified Self talks [42,291], social media posts [12,43,74,98,213,287], posts to forums [84,189,207,219], or app reviews [36,76,233].…”