The Memory Glasses

an example of a context-aware wearable application

More information on the Memory glasses may be found at the MIThril Memory Glasses Page.

Defining Useful Context for the Memory Glasses

We chose to focus on the three contexts of "when, where, and who" as the basis for the memory glasses application. The first is essentially free (time is the simplest context to determine), the second requires location awareness and the third requires a potentially difficult action-context determination. However, these three contexts taken together span a reasonable subset of the useful context space for a general-purpose reminder application.

Context Sensing and Classification for the Memory Glasses

Several different strategies could be used to sense and classify the location and action context needed for the Memory Glasses application. For the prototype MIThril implementation, we chose to use a tag-based approach that allows the sensing of both location and interacting-with-person-X context. This tag-based approach has the advantages of being simple to implement, low-power, reliable, and computationally inexpensive. The disadvantage is that it requires that all interior locations, objects, and people of interest be tagged.

HCI for the Memory Glasses

The memory glasses application is very simple and requires a minimum of user intervention once tags are mapped and reminders are scheduled. A small head-mounted display showing pictures and text associated with the wearer's present location and conversation partner are superimposed over a portion of the visual field of one eye. For instance, If the wearer were standing at a particular location in the borglab and talking to Sandy Pentland, she would see:

Image and text output from prototype Memory Glasses implementation, actual resolution

dev-tty1, borglab Sandy Pentland