Some time ago I was truly thinking to something like that: a device that could record a part of my life. There are a couple of projects that are going in that direction (see the wearable life monitor). Nicolas pointed to the Sensecam project at Microsoft.

So it seems that there is an interest in recording a part of our life not just with the pictures but with other sorts of logs:

1- the trace of our path; the positions were we go; the places that we visited (Step logger);

2- the emotions that we feel at some point in time (Greenwich emotion map);

3- the pollution that we are exposed to during the day (feral robots);

Collecting these traces is so intriguing that we also want our pets to do the same (AIBO-life). But what’s the value of recording this information? Comparing? Remembering? Sharing? Maybe a combination of these.

Technology is reaching the critical point where all these simple recording will be facilitated by thousands of cheap sensors that we will have all around our premises.

Nike and Apple went commercial with something like that and I decided to give it a try. I find extremely interesting to look at the recordings of my runs because it helps me to compare my workouts and to fix specific challenges. There is also a value in remembering after a while what it was that particular run. Pretty much like this blog helps me to remember what I was thinking at that time.

Tags: ethnography, field tools, hack, human computer interaction, information metric, information visualization, map algorithms, mobile learning, psychogeography, ubiquitous computing, urban, urban exploration, user experience