Pervasive Services And Mobile Devices May Support Human Memory And Enhance Daily Efficiency

A service capable of supporting human memory requires complex computational tasks that are still unavailable in mobile devices; however, broadband connectivity allows weaving together server side computational power with client side rich content delivery. In this paper, we provide a complete description of the 4W (what-where-when-who) project and its current prototype. The system aims at providing a service that mitigates the negative effects of stress or aging on the memorisation capability of humans leveraging both client side and server side state of the art solutions. The prototype is capable of capturing user needs/to-dos, reasoning to identify where those needs/tasks can be fulfilled/performed efficiently and providing timely and localised hints about the identified sweet-spots. We have tested with real users both the general efficacy of the system and the different level of efficiency of several hint-notification modes: we present our results and we provide a discussion of our findings.