Cell phones and other mobile devices may soon offer help to faltering memories. New software technology created in IBM Research Labs uses the images, sounds, and text recorded on the devices to help people recall names, faces, conversations and other important information.
The technology uses associative recall to make connections between pieces of related data. A big advantage of the new technology is that it can understand the context in which data is captured, connect various data, and use this knowledge to help bring the correct information to a person when it is needed.
"This is like having a personal assistant for your memory," said Dr. Yaakov Navon, the lead researcher and image processing expert from IBM's Haifa Research Lab. "Our daily routines are overflowing with situations where we gain new information through meetings, advertisements, conferences, events, surfing the web, or even window shopping. Instead of going home and using a general web search to find that information, the technology helps the brain recall those everyday things you might normally forget."
Today's mobile devices have a number of functions that can record data in real time. IBM's new software blends techniques from image processing, GPS information, smart clustering, optical character recognition, speech recognition, and information retrieval to index and tag the information.
For example, if you meet someone at a conference and use your phone to take a picture of him or her and another picture of that person's business card, the new technology will associate the two pieces of data because they were taken at the same time and location. It then creates a virtual briefcase of data that includes the person's image, the name of the conference where you met, the date and time, and any other relevant data.