What if we could capture the moments we normally miss?

Over winter break I noticed my wife taking notes of noteworthy, cute, or in some way memorable moments in our children’s upbringing. This led me to poking around online to see if any technology existed which enabled a better means of capturing these kinds of moments and memories.

Apps exist for taking manual notes, but this got me thinking… what if there could be something that could be a fly on the wall of day to day family experiences, where so much of the meaningful and coming of age moments present themselves. These moments can’t be forced to appear on camera, they just happen. So why can’t there be something which notices and preserves these moments for us?

This led me to build what is described in the below video. A fully functioning prototype which by the end of my time off from work - caught 80% of the moments which I determined were worth remembering. I manually labeled around 1k moments as meaningful and worth preserving, or not. In a classical machine learning sense, this became my training data, which I used to tune the system.

Now it sits, processes, and preserves the moments worth remembering, while discarding the rest. A key design choice for this project was 100% privacy. So it works entirely offline, you could take it on a camping trip and it would distill and family memories for you to look back in for years to come.

Here’s the video capturing progress made over my recent winter break:

Thank you for reading and taking interest in my work. If you want me to reach out to you with updates on this project, open sourcing the code, or whatever else may come, drop your email here https://calebolson.com/contact/#-follow-the-automated-family-memories-project.