Know Yourself: Physical and Psychological Self-Awareness With Lifelog

Abstract

Self-awareness is an essential concept in physiology and psychology. Accurate overall self-awareness benefits the development and well being of an individual. The previous research studies on self-awareness mainly collect and analyze data in the laboratory environment through questionnaires, user study, or field research study. However, these methods are usually not real-time and unavailable for daily life applications. Therefore, we propose a new direction of utilizing lifelog for self-awareness. Lifelog records about daily activities are used for analysis, prediction, and intervention on individual physical and psychological status, which can be automatically processed in real-time. With the help of lifelog, ordinary people are able to understand their condition more precisely, get effective personal advice about health, and even discover physical and mental abnormalities at an early stage. As the first step on using lifelog for self-awareness, we learn from the traditional machine learning problems, and summarize a schema on data collection, feature extraction, label tagging, and model learning in the lifelog scenario. The schema provides a flexible and privacy-protected method for lifelog applications. Following the schema, four topics were conducted: sleep quality prediction, personality detection, mood detection and prediction, and depression detection. Experiments on real datasets show encouraging results on these topics, revealing the significant relation between daily activity records and physical and psychological self-awareness. In the end, we discuss the experiment results and limitations in detail and propose an application, Lifelog Recorder, for multi-dimensional self-awareness lifelog data collection.