Ask HN: What's is the state of the art of lifelogging?
A wearable camera paired with advanced computer vision would go a long way, but I haven't found a practical solution yet.
I already log the easy stuff:
- Computer/phone usage (RescueTime, ActivityWatch, keylogger, TimeSnapper)
- Location (Google Maps Timeline, GPS Logger)
- Pictures (Google Photos)
- Internet usage (Google History)
- Fitness (Mi Fit, Google Fit, Strong)
- Finance (Mint)
I even experimented with 24/7 background audio recording but didn't have much success with Google Cloud Speech-to-Text.
The biggest challenge for me is manual logging. Taking pictures of my environment can go a long way (food, receipt, barcode, injury, product, book, ad, ticket, activity, weighing scale) but it becomes more difficult when I need to retrieve and log information from memory (cash spending without a receipt, weightlifting workout, pain, mood, idea, question, todo). I don't like single-purpose apps designed to log a specific domain of events and would prefer something more general purpose. Free-form typing/speech with context-aware semantic tagging and auto-completion could be interesting ways to reconstruct a timeline of events from memory, but it seems like a challenging AI problem that probably isn't solved yet.
Where can I find more about the state-of-the-art in lifelogging, self tracking, quantified self, activity detection, narrative timeline reconstruction? What can I use today to help me collect more information about my life? Even a simple, fast and ergonomic time-stamped journal that syncs across devices seems difficult to find (I've been using my own implementation for the past 6 months but it's starting to show some limitations).