MyRoR

MyRoR was the name of the project and system I created and worked on as part of my PhD.

The lifestyle management area has become increasingly important during the past years due to present as well as expected burden on healthcare systems posed by people living longer and with various chronic conditions. Lifestyles are complex and evolving, therefore when we build systems aimed at such area it is not enough to only focus on certain aspects of users’ lives. Instead, we need to take a more holistic and long-term view of what is important and try to capture as many aspects of people’s lives as possible.

By doing this we can better support users in self-awareness, self-understanding, self-reflection and, ultimately, self-change.
For this purpose, I created a context-aware lifestyle management experience platform able to provide a more comprehensive picture of a user’s daily life in order to support the user in identifying not only what happened during the day but also in providing objective clues related to why it might have happened.

One of the main goals of the MyRoR platform was to provide end users with access to their information so that they can remember and understand what happened and reflect over why it happened.

An important aspect of the thesis work was to transform user data gathered from various sources into data-rich stories. For that, I needed to combine and process information in order to derive more user-friendly meaning.

A MyRoR story was a sequence of meaningful moments within a user’s day. Reflective in-depth interviews were conducted to try to better understand how to derive what is meaningful within a person’s day.

Here is an example:

This was a research work funded by an EPSRC grant through the TSB/EPSRC project called PAL (2009-2012).

You can find all the details in my PhD thesis here. For more information, please contact me.