Active Personal Information Manager: A System for Human Memory Support

Abstract

Several studies both in the field of psychology and in the field of physiology relate stress to the difficulty of transferring information from short term memory to medium term memory. This difficulty causes a reduction in personal efficiency and generates heavy frustration as things to do tend to come to mind with no relation to the user current environment, thus further increasing the stress level of the subjects. We claim that the provision to subjects of timely information about the activities that could be efficiently performed in their current environment could reduce this phenomenon and thus increase personal efficiency and remove the related sense of frustration. In this paper we describe the prototype of a system capable of gathering user needs from verbal commands, translate those needs into queries to a GIS, build a map of locations of interest for the user expressed needs and provide timely prompts as soon as the user current environment guarantees the possibility to efficiently perform an action that satisfies one of the identified needs.