Storica project launched on Kickstarter.com
TecVis LP announces Storica, the most comprehensive lifelogging experience platform at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tecvis/storica-from-sensors-to-digital-stories-0 Through Storica and its companion Android-based recording platform, AIRS, you can experience an amazing wealth of information that can support and inform your memory, awareness, reflection and self-change. Because our interests and needs can change and because life is not only about one single aspect, our solutions allow for recording information about our movements, our physiological wellbeing, our emotions, our social interactions, and our environment.
Storica provides means to process, correlate, investigate, annotate and share your life in a customizable, evolving, personalized, fun, and engaging environment. Storica brings your recordings together by creating beautiful digital stories that offer a glimpse into the most interesting moments throughout the day, allowing people to recollect, annotate and share their memories. Lifelogging involves recording various life aspects through both automatic and manual means and plays an essential part in creating self-monitoring lifestyle management solutions. Self-monitoring is a growing area, driven both by individual and societal needs . However, existing solutions focus mostly on capturing a specific aspect, such as fitness or food intake or mood. For that, people use multiple applications with multiple accounts and multiple data storages that do not allow for easy correlations as well as posing various dangers regarding the ownership of your own data.
We at TecVis, recognise that lives are complex and that the various things happening in our lives are inter-related. Because of that, we create lifelogging solutions that not only show you what happened but also help you understand why it might have happened! For that reason, our Android recording platform, AIRS, can capture a large variety of lifestyle information, both through automatic recording as well as user input. The automatic recording can provide objective information about our lives that we might not even be aware of. The user input allows for gathering personal information that would be hard to determine otherwise and gives people the power to focus the large amount of information on the most meaningful daily moments.
Our approach Your data is all Yours is our main design principle. TecVis neither mines nor collects users’ personal lifelogging data for their own purposes. The service it provides is that of enabling experiences based on such data. For that reason, no data leaves users’ devices without user's knowledge. This is a major departure from existing tracking services, such as in the fitness space, which claim ownership of users’ data for any purpose without compensation for the individual user. Storica goes a different route for ensuring and preserving users’ privacy! Our existing solutions Our Storica mobile app allows for experiencing recordings right on your phone. Tracks are visualised using fly-over maps. Meaningful events (such as social interactions, user annotations, moods or calendar appointments) are gathered and visualised as personalisable ‘stories of your day’. A media gallery enriches your snapshots with context information that go beyond just location.
Detailed visualisations of data recorded are also available through timelines and tag clouds. Storica mobile is free for short-term memory recollection, i.e., looking back no more than 7 days at any point of time. Longer-term recollection (e.g., looking through your recordings from Christmas) can be purchased through secure in-app billing .
AIRS is our Android-based recording platform, which can be also be used independently of Storica. AIRS allows for deciding what to record and how, securely storing recordings in an internal SQlite database. AIRS can record various types of location and movement information, environmental data such as ambient noise level, light, atmospheric pressure, humidity (on Galaxy S4) and weather (through external web service), physiological information such as heart rate (by using attached sensors such as the Zephyr HxM), information about daily social interactions and many more. Widgets are supported for capturing self-annotations, mood changes as well as blood pressure readings. Recording through AIRS is highly optimised in terms of battery consumption. When executing the Lifelogging template (which comes as standard), battery consumption per hour increases from ca. 1% (Galaxy Nexus on Android 4.2.2) to about 3.5% to 4%. Using the innovative Adaptive GPS feature that suspends GPS in usual locations such as home or work, reduces this consumption to 2.5%. Hence, users can record all day without depleting their battery. AIRS is free and open source and can be extended with other input types as well as used for collecting data for further processing.
Our recently launched developer section provides API documentation as well as a forum for discussions. Future developments Our plan is to continue to develop Storica into an experience platform that can capture user needs that range from documenting trips to using it to monitor various health conditions! Going beyond mobile is one of the next steps for TecVis.
We are happy to announce that we have just launched our first Kickstarter project that will help us integrate the desktop environment into our offering. This will allow us to incorporate additional information about daily activities, such as applications used and search interests, take advantage of the larger footprint provided by such environment as well as provide more means for creating and sharing experiences as well as data. Storica desktop will require a monthly subscription allowing users to add new data to the system and receive continuous updates containing new processing and visualisation functionalities.
Contact info Website: http://www.tecvis.co.uk Email: [email protected]