Lifelogging captures a real picture of your health

Claire O'Connell, contributor

(Image: Jacqueline Kerr et al.)

What difference does it make to your lifestyle if you've got a camera hanging around your neck that is recording every move? A clutch of papers in a special issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine aims to answer that question by looking at how so-called lifelogging can influence behaviour.

Much of the research involves Microsoft's SenseCam, which is worn on a lanyard around the neck so it can automatically take hundreds of first-person-view images each day.

One study asked 40 people to wear a SenseCam and an accelerometer to compare how the devices tracked their movements each minute. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the camera gave richer information about context, and it picked up on subtleties such as standing rather than sitting - accelerometers tended to classify both as sedentary behaviour.

Meanwhile, active volunteers - trainee jockeys, Gaelic footballers and university students - wore SenseCams and kept food diaries for one day. The camera picked up?on factors such as portion size, forgotten foods, leftovers and brand names, and the pictorial evidence often revealed a higher estimated calorie intake than the wearers themselves reported. This suggests that combining a conventional food diary and a SenseCam could offer a more accurate picture of total energy intake for people who are closely monitoring their diets, such as athletes.

And if a SenseCam is out of reach, a smartphone slung onto a lanyard might do the trick instead. One of the studies asked 47 volunteers to wear a smartphone equipped with lifelogging software that collected data from built-in functions including the accelerometer, compass, camera and GPS. There were some issues with battery life - plus using the phone to track your behaviour means you can't easily use it as a phone. But the authors note that platforms such as smartphones could make camera-wearing more feasible in a wider range of populations.

Wearable cameras have "exciting potential" in health studies, but there are still hurdles to clear before the equipment becomes more widely adopted, says Aiden Doherty from the Centre for Sensor Web Technologies at Dublin City University in Ireland.

Not least is how to process the vast amount of image data produced. "We are working on the challenge of automatically identifying lifestyle behaviour from wearable camera data," he says.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/284a0b56/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A130C0A20Clifelogging0Ehealth0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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