Multimedia Memory Cues for Augmenting Human Memory

Abstract

Technology has always had a direct impact on what humans remember. In the era of smartphones and wearable devices, people easily capture information, such as pictures and videos, on a daily basis. The so-called quantified self movement focuses on using such captured multimedia information, often in combination with additional contextual data (such as GPS traces or social media posts), with the goal of extracting and providing better insights into people's everyday actions (for example, fitness tracking, work productivity, and dieting). However, a more interesting use of such captured data might be to directly support human memory. Here, the authors describe their efforts in the EU Recall project to extract memory cues from multimedia records to augment human memory beyond simple memory prosthetics.