BACKGROUND
The wide availability and small size, together with the decrease in pricing of different types of sensors, has made it possible, over the last decade, to acquire a huge amount of data about a person's life in real time. These sensors can be incorporated into personal electronic devices available at reasonable cost, such as smartphones and small wearable devices. They allow the acquisition of images, audio, location, physical activity and physiological signals, among other data. With these data, usually denoted as lifelog data, we can then analyze and understand personal experiences and behaviors. This process is called lifelogging.
OBJECTIVE
The goal of this article is to review the literature in the research area of lifelogging over the past decade and provide an historical overview on this research topic. To this purpose, we analyze lifelogging applications that monitor and assist people with memory problems.
METHODS
We follow a narrative review methodology to conduct a comprehensive search of relevant publications in Google Scholar and Scopus databases. In order to find these relevant publication, topic-related keywords were identified and combined based on different lifelogging type of data and applications.
RESULTS
A total of 124 publications were selected and included in this narrative review. 411 publications were retrieved and screened from the two scholar databases. Out of these, 114 publications were fully reviewed. In addition, 32 more publications were manually included based on our bibliographical knowledge in this research field.
CONCLUSIONS
The use of personal lifelogs can be beneficial to improve the life quality of people suffering from memory problems, such as dementia. Through the acquisition and analysis of lifelog data, lifelogging systems can create digital memories to be used as surrogate memory. Through this narrative we understand that contextual information can be extracted from the lifelogs and it provides significant information for understanding the daily life of people suffering from memory issues based on events, experiences and behaviors.