Confabulation nation

Using lifelogging For a truly patient centric view

FishEye let us see the world as people experience it

Confabulation has been a favourite word of mine since I first came across it as a teenager.  Confabulation is what people do when they can’t remember things, and it’s something that we all do … a lot.  Its also the reason we developed a research approach called lifelogging that super charges the human memory and brings a new perspective on the world we seek to understand.

Confabulate is defined as: to replace a gap in one's memory by a falsification that one believes to be true.

Instinctively, confabulation sounds like a negative behaviour.  Falsifying stuff is generally considered to be a bad thing to do. However, when it comes to filling in the gaps in our memory it’s an essential life skill since our operating system is inherently flawed when it comes to remembering and recalling the detail of our day to day lives.

That’s pretty important when you spend your life trying to understand and improve the lives that people live with health conditions.  Only basing one’s understanding on what people are able to remember and report back to us leaves us with a lot of ‘filled in gaps’ that we then base our analysis and decision making on.

That’s why we developed a research process where we have people wear cameras that do a much better job of remembering the detail by capturing life as a stream of consecutive images.  We call this process lifelogging and it allows us to access what really happens in people’s lives.  Basing decisions on the complete picture means creating communication that resonates with people’s lived reality.  It also allows us to fully deliver on the idea of patient centricity - developing strategy and solutions that are inspired by people’s needs, experiences and routines.