Are Conversation Logs Useful Sources for Generating Memory Cues for Recalling Past Memories?

Abstract

In recent years with the emergence of wearable devices for lifelogging, every day huge archives of data consisting of images, audio, etc are generated from a person's life. As a result researchers in this field have focused on building applications that utilize lifelog archives for various human-aid applications. Several studies have shown the effectiveness of replaying recordings of one's life in aiding human memory to recall past events. Specifically, lifelog images captured automatically by wearable cameras have been very popular in these studies. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of lifelog conversations in a workplace environment as useful sources of information for extracting memory cues to recall past events. We present a method for generating memory cues for augmenting one's memory. Furthermore, we conduct a user study with five groups of people, where each group consists of two individuals, in order to examine the effectiveness of our approach. Our results on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in aiding people recalling the contents of past conversations. Such results were achieved by showing summary memory cues of past conversations to each participant for a maximum duration of only five minutes to aid recall of past events.