Field Notes: Running Egocentric Data Collection Across Southeast Asia
What it takes to collect 10,000+ hours a month of consented, high-quality first-person data across five Southeast Asian countries: sites, consent, participants, devices, QA and upload.
Workplace egocentric collection succeeds or fails on operations: employer consent before the first session, trained participants, devices that are charged, clean and correctly mounted, protocol-specific QA that catches duplicates and filler footage, and reliable upload. Hardware choice matters, but process discipline decides yield.
Scale and coverage
We collect more than 10,000 hours a month across Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, in commercial and household environments, using phones, egocentric glasses and headsets, and tactile gloves. Capacity grows month on month.
Session readiness
Every session starts with the same checklist: battery at 80% or more (power bank for long shifts), 10 GB+ free storage, collection app verified, lens cleaned, mount secured before entering the work area, and upload over Wi-Fi confirmed before leaving.
Consent first
Recording in commercial environments requires employer or site-manager approval before the first session, plus participant consent. Sensitive areas, customers and screens are excluded by protocol.
Quality control
Buyers reject duplicate participants, staged or monotonous filler footage and sensitive content. QA must be protocol-specific, documented and fast enough to retrain participants within days.
Where hardware helps
Phone rigs give scale; stereo global-shutter recorders with synchronised IMU give the geometry buyers increasingly ask for. Running operations and hardware together lets us qualify devices in the field, not just on the bench.
HOLON (2026). Field Notes: Running Egocentric Data Collection Across Southeast Asia. HOLON-FN-2026-004, v1.0. https://www.holonai.ai/research/sea-egocentric-data-operations