The document discusses tools for personal data collection. It lists various types of data the author wants to track, such as food/drink consumed, stress levels, ambient sounds/photos/videos, social interactions, medical records, and spending. It also discusses challenges with data acquisition, preservation, access and analysis, as well as interfaces for viewing raw data. The document considers data formats, preservation methods, and issues with collecting data from various disconnected sources.

1. Tools for Personal Data
Collection
Notes
November 2, 2012

2. 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

3. 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

4. Things I want to track
• Medical records – connect to mood, food
consumption
• Spending – credit cards
– Many memories encoded into the transaction
history

5. 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

6. 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?

7. Data Formats
• Collect data in points of time
• Stream data

8. OAIS

9. 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

10. 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