DejaView: Help with memory, when you need it

Promising findings in the use of wearable memory aids such as SenseCam have been widely reported. However, to date, there has been relatively little consideration of the potential for offering memory help in real-time during daily living. Such assistance, in the form of proactive visual prompts comprising the four reported types of cue (people, places, objects, and actions), could help people with memory problems to immediately orientate themselves in a situation -- supplying details of where they are, or who they are with. This paper reports on the three-tier DejaView system, designed to provide such help. DejaView works across a wearable device, a smartphone, and a remote computer, simultaneously recording a lifelog, finding appropriate cues from past experiences, and feeding relevant information back to the user. The real-time nature of this system required the design of a new wearable device, similar to SenseCam but more customisable and additionally capable of transmitting data over Bluetooth. Fitting this into the three-tier architecture allows for complex processing in the system without limiting the battery lifetime of the portable and wearable parts. In the currently-implemented example, photos captured by the wearable device are compared against a database of faces stored on the remote computer. The user subsequently receives information about people around them via their smartphone. More generally, the architecture permits a wide range of intelligent methods for selecting useful cues, based on the user's environment, to be integrated into the system, facilitating the provision of real-time help for memory problems.