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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