LifeBio Preserves Your Story for Future Generations
Before you buy DNA kits for the family this holiday season, why not interview and record your parents and grandparents using LifeBio? CEO Lisbeth Sanders explains how her company helps people unspool and preserve their life stories.
By S.C. Stuart
Lisbeth Sanders has one of those great American family stories. Five of her ancestors came over on The Mayflower. Her descendants fought in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars before putting down roots in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Sanders’ clan were witnesses to history, but back then, the stories of kings, queens, robber barons, and generals topped those of “ordinary people.”
Today, social media gives everyone a voice, but how best to organize a life into a cohesive story for future generations to hear? That’s the challenge Sanders is tackling with her biography recording startup, LifeBio.
The idea took root in her 20s when Sanders interviewed her grandmother about her life. “In 1910, when she was just 3 years old, my grandmother Margaret told me she was taken to the County Fair in Washington, Pennsylvania, and she heard a loud noise,” Sanders said. “She turned around, and looked up, and saw her first ever airplane take off. Then, eight years later, she remembered the joy she felt as all the church bells rang in Pittsburgh; WWI had just ended, on Nov. 11, 1918.
“It was so neat to hear from a witness to that point in history,” said Sanders. “And to have it, now, still with me, in her own words. I learned really touching, and challenging, things about her life. For instance, she taught eight grades in a one-room schoolhouse at the top of Walnut Creek Hill in Erie, Pennsylvania, but she had to quit as soon as she got engaged. It shocked me that, in 1937, women couldn’t be married and a teacher. No one has ever told me that I couldn’t do anything. It really put my life, and hers, in perspective.”
LifeBio Backstory
Sanders studied English and journalism at Ohio’s Otterbein University, and after graduation, she worked in IT Sales at Micro Electronics, Inc. in Columbus.
“Working with consumers and later corporate customers, I learned that it was important to explain things simply, and I realized that keeping technology easy-to-use was really important,” Sanders said. “User experience and exactly how the user interface operates are important especially for LifeBio, which works with an older demographic much more than most companies.”
The LifeBio idea began to form in 2000, but Sanders didn’t leave her day job until 2005, when she secured financial backers and built out the first iteration of the platform in-house. Sanders used the experience with her grandmother and her journalism background to write the LifeBio biography questions, which are used to help customers unspool their life stories.
Now there’s a team of 20 staff, including software engineers, editors, and machine learning experts behind the scenes. It caters to two sets of customers: individuals who want to record family histories and enterprise accounts, including large healthcare companies, government agencies and elder care homes that use the service as “reminiscence therapy.”
How LifeBio Works
Once you’ve set up a LifeBio account, you can capture personal or family stories at lifebio.com or via the LifeBio iOS app (an Android version is due out in Q2 2020). Right now, it’s a one-off fee of $89, but the team is experimenting with different pricing models, including monthly hosting fees starting at $9.99 covering the storage of stories, audio, video, and photos.
On the web, LifeBio provides a primary “Biography” template with up to 200 questions organized in 35 categories, prompting people to share what matters most, including People Who Shaped You, Childhood/Teen Memories, and Bringing It All Together. Other story templates (Health, Veteran, Love) compile stories from multiple people who share memories of a loved one who has passed on.
The iOS app supports live video recordings and uploads, and will soon add a speech-to-text option for easier transcribing if your typing can’t keep up with your great uncle’s rapid-fire storytelling.
Once the data is added, pictures, stories and videos uploaded, the system compiles it into a compelling narrative. It can then be viewed safely and privately online, hosted by LifeBio, and also printed out in physical books. “People still like to hold their life stories in their hands,” said Sanders.
What happens if your interviewing skills aren’t up to scratch? “We can help with that too,” said Sanders. “LifeBio has Personal Biographers who conduct digitally recorded interviews by phone. We know that sometimes clients need a ‘kickstart’ so the phone interview is done and then transcribed and uploaded inside LifeBio.com.”
Turning Aunt Henrietta Into an AI-Based Hologram
Will we one day be able to don a VR headset or AR spectacles and chat with our ancestors as AI-powered holograms, as Steven Spielberg has done for Holocaust survivors? It’s possible.
“As we move into the future, there are a number of user interface design projects in the works,” explained Sanders. “We see LifeBio inventing new ways to digitally experience the person’s sweet memories, hear and see their incredible moments, view priceless photos, and get advice now, and in the future.
“The technology is evolving fast, and we will be using machine learning to make it easier and easier to capture the story and to deeply know the most important people in our lives through context and expanding/matching data sets.”
After all, scrolling through relatives’ social media feeds is one thing, but actually learning how they grew up, what they’ve been through, what they’ve seen, felt, and done is necessary for social cohesiveness, she said.
“Social connectedness over the next few decades needs help,” said Sanders. “We have an epidemic of loneliness in the US and across the globe. I see LifeBio making conversations happen for real between the generations. We can use social media to actually bring grandchildren and grandparents together in the most remarkable way to talk about the most remarkable things. They think they know each other, but they don’t. They really don’t. I want to change that.”
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com on October 28, 2019.
