In the wired world of the 21st century, it seems impossible to forget anything. A cartoon pops up on your computer screen reminding you that it's a friend's birthday. An exclamation mark surfaces on your palmtop alerting you to a looming project deadline. Every once in a while your mobile phone breaks into spasms of music to signal your next appointment.
And yet you forget -- your reading glasses when you are rushing to work, your coat when you are going to the cleaners, your receipts when you are driving 30 miles to see your tax lawyer.
Such absent-mindedness may be frustrating to you, but to researchers and technology companies, it presents a potential market for memory aids, devices that will deliver reminders based not on calendar entries but where the user is at any given time. Unlike time-based alarms, such as the ones used with a digital organizer or an e-mail program, these devices will sound off when you walk by the refrigerator, for example, or the file cabinet, reminding you of the frozen lunch or the printouts you need to carry to work.
PHOTO: NY TIMESS
To the scientists who are developing them, memory aids are much-needed appliances, the fruit of advances in computing that could improve the lives of many. But to critics, memory aids could well be an example of innovation driving need, an overkill of sensors and sophistication to do the work of Post-its.
Michael Beigl, a researcher at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, belongs to the former category. Beigl's creation, the MemoClip, is a device equipped with a computer and a small electronic display that can be pinned on to the user's shirt. As the user moves about the house or the office, the clip communicates with wireless transmitters installed at places such as a kitchen or a conference room, providing constant updates on the user's whereabouts.
The clip matches the user's location with the list of tasks that the user wants to remember. All of the reminders and a database of locations must be entered in advance into a computer. MemoClip beeps when the user is near any location associated with a particular task. The text of the appropriate reminder is called up on the display.
Gloria Barczak, a Northeastern University marketing expert who studies innovation, finds it hard to imagine people wearing a computing device just to remind themselves to take the trash out. "The average consumer is more likely to make a list of things to do," Barczak said. "I can think of niche markets, however, like people with big houses and a lot going on in their lives."
Making a list of things to do is not the same as actually doing them -- an observation that could be equally applicable to memory aids. Dr Edward Tenner, author of Why Things Bite Back -- about technology's tendency to "recomplicate" life -- fears that tracking and managing reminders delivered by electronic devices might simply be an added chore.
"Let's say the alarm goes off, and now the frozen meal comes out of the refrigerator and goes on the table," Tenner said. "But where is the reminder to take it from the table later? Or if it isn't taken from the refrigerator, how many times will the alarm sound before it's finally turned off?"
The answers could lie in making the technology even more sophisticated. Anind Dey spent the past few years at the Georgia Institute of Technology thinking up combinations of specific contexts in which people need reminders. Her prototype, called CybreMinder, allows a user to specify conditions under which to remember a task, like taking an umbrella to work if it is cloudy or someone else needs the car.
The system does not require the user to wear a special device but requires a longer list of devices to be installed in the environment. CybreMinder receives information from temperature and location sensors, cameras and speech recognition units. It looks out for conditions listed by the user, which could include a meeting with a particular person or the status of a remote third person. The reminder is delivered via e-mail, a pop-up window on the device display that is closest to the user, or synthesized speech on the mobile phone.
"The difficult part is to sense a lot of interesting things in our lives," said Dey, who is continuing his work at Intel Corp. "For example, I want to talk to a friend when I get home after 7pm and I am not doing anything. Only the time element is easy to sense. The other pieces of `context' are not."
Wearing computers to remedy forgetfulness may sound a little strange, but researchers point out that the idea is a logical extension of the digital organizer and the alarm clock. "Pro-active memory aids can liberate the mind to be more creative and not be bogged down by administrative minutiae," said Thad Starner, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech. "Even something as simple as my calendar program helps me concentrate on what I am doing instead of worrying about what I have to do next."
What stands in the way of marketing memory aids, and many other mobile computing applications, is the infrastructure required. The technology needed to sense a person's location inside a building, for example, would have to be commercialized in a form that would be usable for such applications.
"We don't know when that will happen," Beigl said.
Richard DeVaul, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, says there was a wide range of circumstances in which memory aids could be used now, even without sophisticated "context" sensing.
"A reminder like `Next time I'm near a grocery store and am on the way home, remind me to get eggs' requires only a map of local grocery stores -- easily obtained by a GPS device -- and my daily routine," DeVaul said.
Together with his adviser, Alex Pentland, DeVaul is developing a situational reminder system called Memory Glasses, part of a larger wearable-computing project. The glasses go along with a jacket that is fitted with computing, sensing and speech recognition equipment. Reminders are flashed across a display wired to the glasses.
By linking wide-ranging sensing capabilities with complex rules, researchers could infuse the system with an almost humanlike intelligence. The memory glasses, for instance, could be made to recognize the difference between a chance meeting and a scheduled meeting and change the type of reminder provided.
"If I am talking to my adviser in the elevator, I probably want only to be reminded of the highest-priority items, since it is likely that we will be going our separate ways when we exit," DeVaul said. "But if I am in his office or at a scheduled meeting, I am likely to have more time."
Even without such fine discriminatory capabilities, memory aids could be a handy tool for some people. One potential group of users, Tenner said, could be waiters who have to keep track of orders, prepare individual checks and coordinate serving.
One general concern about memory aids is that they could lead to less reliable human memories, said Bradley Rhodes, a research scientist at Ricoh Innovations in Menlo Park, California, whose interests include wearable computing and intelligence augmentation.
"Aristotle questioned whether the new invention called `writing' might hurt human memory because people would use it as a crutch," Rhodes said. "He was right. Few people today can memorize volumes of material like ancient Greeks did. But that does not mean writing is a bad thing."
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