PaintMySteps: Enhancing Personal Geo Temporal Lifelogging Through Lens Based Interactive Visualization

May 18, 2026

Lifelogging systems help individuals record, organize, and revisit personal data collected during everyday life. While mobile devices and sensors make it easy to capture geotemporal information, turning this data into meaningful personal insight remains challenging. Many existing tools rely on numerical summaries or static visualizations that often overlook the contextual, semantic, and narrative aspects of personal experience. This dissertation presents PaintMySteps, an extension of the MySteps lifelogging platform, created to improve the exploration of annotated personal movement data. The system combines GPX trajectory files with semantic annotations stored in LIFE files and introduces an interactive lens based visualization framework within a map centered interface. Two main types of lenses are provided: filtering lenses, which select subsets of trajectories based on spatial, temporal, or semantic criteria, and attribute lenses, which change the visual appearance of data according to attributes such as tags, place categories, or days of the week. By combining multiple lenses, PaintMySteps enables flexible and expressive exploration of personal routines, movements, and contextual activities. It strengthens the link between raw movement traces and personal annotations, helping users discover patterns that are difficult to detect through conventional summaries. A user centered evaluation with twenty participants examined usability, effectiveness, and perceived workload. Results showed that users were generally able to complete exploration tasks successfully and reported a positive usability experience. However, more complex lens combinations increased cognitive effort. Overall, this work demonstrates that semantically enriched, lens based visualization can support more meaningful, reflective, and insightful interaction with lifelogging data.

Authors in the community:

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  M

  Miguel Correia Coimbra Mano

  ist199286

Supervisors of this institution:

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  D

  Daniel Jorge Viegas Gonçalves

  ist13898

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico