The Impact of the Encoding View in Location-Based Reminders: Improving Prospective Remembering.

Proliferation of small computing-enabled devices coupled with the richness of communication infrastructure has made location-based computing a reality. Location-based reminders (LBRs) provide alarms and notices to users based on their location. These are typically used to remind us to complete a to-do task at a particular location. The current design of LBRs fails to take advantage of prospective memory theory. We hypothesize that if the encoding stage provides a closer match to the retrieval stage, then location recognition and task recall in LBRs will improve at retrieval time. We conducted a between subjects experiment and measured performance as location recognition and task recall. We found strong evidence in support that a first-person view benefits prospective remembering the most. We close with a discussion of the implications for the design of the encoding stage for future LBR systems.