Paper Reading #5: Creating Salient Summaries of Home Activity Lifelog Data

Comment 1: http://chiblog.sjmorrow.com/2011/02/paper-reading-5-creating-salient.html
Comment 2: http://csce436-nabors.blogspot.com/2011/01/reading-5-creating-salient-summaries-of.html

Creating Salient Summaries of Home Activity Lifelog Data
Matthew L. Lee
CHI 2010: Doctoral Consortium

There is a lot of research done on declining cognitive functions of elderly people however not much is done to help them quantify this data and let the person know what the data means or what purpose it servers. Lee talks about how elderly people first lose cognitive function slow and then progress, forgetting entire tasks or how to do multi-step actions. He wants to run tests such as Instrumental Activities of Daily Living: activities that test patients abilities to do simple tasks such as taking medicine, making breakfast and doing housework. These give indicators about how deeply set the decline is and allow for intervention. Lee proposes using a more hands on system that will watch the person in their home and collect what he calls "lifelog data". He wants to address questions such as how well people perform everyday activities, what kind of information these people need, and what kind of sensing systems are needed to collect further data. He also has done surveys of people who have use similar equipment and asked what kind of information would be important to these people and tried to set up the system to collect this kind of data. They then used this data to help evaluate what these people need to change in order to live more independently. Patients claimed that the information collected was a lot more useful than what was able to be collected in a single visit with a doctor. He then talks about how he plans to refine the searches by collecting a lot of data and then presenting visualizations and other models. He says this this could be a breakthrough for diagnosis and curing of cognitive decline in the elderly.

 I think this article is interesting in that it is gathering a new kind of data that hasn't been used a lot in the medical field. Instead of just giving standardized tests Lee is going to collect data about how elderly people perform different actions and then present it to doctors as a supplement. I think the idea is inherently interesting, cameras recording someone doing different tasks and then having them analyzed and transferred to a discussion about how far progressed ones memory loss is. It also happens to be that we just read about how tricky memory can be in Design of Everyday Things. We learned that there are different kinds of memory and that we are not exactly sure how memory works. Regarding this, we know that the information that is being studied here is knowledge of the world that the elderly should be gathering from their environment and for some reason is not being kept (remembered). I am very curious to see if this kind of experiment is going to be detailed enough to explain why this phenomenon is happening or if the info is more simple and will only be able to diagnose the problem and help find a solution. If there is a lot of detail in something like this it really could redefine the way we look at cognitive decline and lead to new medical breakthroughs.