Investigating older and younger peoples' motivations for lifelogging with wearable cameras

People have a natural tendency to collect things about themselves, their experiences and their shared experiences with people important to them, especially family. Similar to traditional objects such as photographs, lifelogs have been shown to support reminiscence. A lifelog is a digital archive of a person's experiences and activities and lifelog devices such as wearable cameras can automatically and continuously record events throughout a whole day. We were interested in investigating what would motivate people to lifelog. Due to the importance of shared family reminiscence between family members we focused our study on comparing shared or personal motivations with ten older and ten younger family members. We found from our results that both older and younger adults were more likely to lifelog for the purposes of information sharing and that reviewing lifelog images supported family reminiscence, reflection and story-telling. Based on these findings, recommendations are made for the design of a novel intergenerational family lifelog system.