The Government has a complete file of your life

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97. The Future of Lifelogging – Interview with Gordon Bell

Lifelogging pioneer Gordon Bell has been using a wearable camera in some form since early 2000. He was the subject for the MyLifeBits experimental lifelogging project and is a principal Researcher at Microsoft. Here he talks with the Autographer team about the future of lifelogging.

Gordon, you’ve been involved at the forefront of technology for many years now, from minicomputers, timesharing and multiprocessors in the 1960s, to the birth of the internet through to the fascinating work with Microsoft Research. What was it that led you to first become interested in wearable technology?

LUCK! Or as Pasteur said: “Chance favours the prepared mind.”

In 1998 I started the quest to capture bits of my life so as to be paperless. That soon evolved to include “everything” in life… without really thinking a lot about what that meant. By 2001, when we wrote the first paper on Storing Everything, except anything real time. We started the MyLifeBits project based on the necessity of a database and Gates’ 1995 observation that “someday you will be able to store everything you see and hear”. Vannevar Bush’s 1945 design of Memex was our design spec.

In 2000, I met Dr. Astro Teller, the founder of BodyMedia, a wearable armband for tracking energy expenditure and heart rate, which was similarly intriguing for health monitoring. I started wearing this device in late 2002, so the idea that there would be full body monitoring was already coming into view.

In the late 1990s I had seen the MIT ‘Cyborgs’ – Steve Mann, Thad Starner, and others at the MediaLab, who were doing various forms of lifelogging. In September 2003 the founder of DejaView contacted me about using their wearable video capture that stored snippets; and then in October, Lyndsay Williams of Microsoft Research produced the first wearable SenseCam with Fisheye lens, based on the Philips USB Key Camera. So it was pretty clear that something for visual capture was going to happen. Lyndsay sent me one of their first prototype SenseCams in 2004.

http://blog.autographer.com/2013/05/the-future-of-lifelogging-interview-with-gordon-bell/

Now that's what I call a file!