Name: Anjana S

Guide: Prof. Venkatesh Rajamanickam

Course: Interaction

Samay Lekha – Activity Chronicle

Time use studies rely on either participants keeping track of their activities or data collectors observing and interviewing participants. This is effort intensive relative to the quality of data thus collected.
In this project I attempt to create a Time Use Data collection tool that is context aware, effortless for the respondent and saves data in a research-convenient format. Samay Lekha is a smartphone application which attempts to enable entering data as easily as any

daily routine for the respondent. The researcher gets an activity data-sheet along with the context of occurrence of the activity with the entries in the form of tags, consequently solving for both the researcher and the participant.

Time use studies rely on either participants keeping track of their activities or data collectors observing and interviewing participants. This is effort intensive relative to the quality of data thus collected. In this project, I attempt to create a Time Use Data collection tool that is context aware, effortless for the respondent and saves data in a research-convenient format. Samay Lekha is a smartphone application which attempts to enable entering data as easy as any daily routine for the respondent.
Video link – https://youtu.be/gdAW9U4j0_g

A widget can be added to access the app and log time on the go with three input features – timer, camera and a microphone. Clicking tags icon from the main widget or from the warning screen, gives a drop down list of activities. The activities are based on the proposed list from secondary research.

Once an activity is logged it appears in a timeline which can be viewed and edited from the app. Exclamation means the activity is not completed on the timeline and still some editing is required which means not all fields are completed but some marker is added. The voice recording or the photograph clicked while logging time is the marker. On tapping the Exclamation, the user gets to edit the activity and update it.

The data gets saved in the database and the details are in a simple format based on the tags. This can be easily viewed and sent to the researcher. The option to extract this is available in the burger button from the app.