YourDigitalSelf
YourDigitalSelf is an Android mobile device application that gathers and integrates personal digital traces into coherent groupings that share a common theme, task or goal. This app is used as the basis to retrieve personal digital data originating from various sources to be used to implement and evaluate our research in the DigitalSelf project, through user studies and surveys. It can also act as a standalone user interface to help users navigate through their own personal digital traces in order to make sense of their data and individual patterns as well as to provide them with narrative views of their digital memories.
Personal Data Extraction and Integration
YourDigitalSelf gathers various types of personal digital traces pertaining to a user and considers various sets of sources and objects, including emails, social network interactions, application data, web search information, financial data, and files. The data currently collected in the application (new services can be added as needed) are from the following services: Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, Google Calendar, Plaid (for getting financial transactions), and GPS mobile data (either through Google Maps or by the phone’s built-in GPS tracker). It is also included the option of getting financial transactions through Google Drive, by giving users the ability to upload their financial transactions through .csv files given by various bank institutions.
One of the main challenges in integrating personal digital traces lies in the fragmentation of data and the heterogeneity of their data models. To integrate all these “document schemas”, we have designed a unified and intuitive formal conceptual data model to link and represent both personal data and their corresponding coherent episodes. We base our model on observations in the Cognitive Psychology literature that suggests that a natural way for people to remember past events is by any pertinent contextual information (answers to the who, what, where, when, why and how questions). Thus, we have modeled and indexed the personal digital traces by following these six dimensions (we call this, the w5h model).
Event and Activity Recognition
YourDigitalSelf also connects related personal digital traces to atomic events, and groups them in their corresponding conceptually coherent episodes by means of scripts (i.e. prototypical plans). Essentially, each data trace presents evidence of various strengths for the occurrence of 0 or more atomic event instances, which make up the (sub)scripts.
In addition, our system can be extended to cover many different scenarios/scripts due to the systematic and extensible approach of our script creation and instantiation.
Code
You can download YourDigitalSelf app in your Android mobile device, and see the results of our instantiation algorithms on a variety of real-life scripts.
It is important to stress that YourDigitalSelf keeps all data on the user’s device and therefore guarantees full privacy.
Find the code on the YourDigitalSelf Github page, or download the Android apk directly below.
