The Amnesia Atlas constitutes a pilot study for a photographic media interface as memory prosthesis. It utilises the wearable life-logging camera SenseCam to shed light on the importance of photographic imagery and place for memory retrieval. It investigates the relationships of spatiotemporal context on memory encoding and retrieval, utilising immersive 3D visualisation.

SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that captures an electronic record of the wearer's day. It does this by automatically recording a series of still images through its wide-angle lens, and simultaneously capturing a log of data from a number of built-in electronic sensors. Subsequently reviewing a sequence of images appears to provide a powerful autobiographical memory cue. A preliminary evaluation of SenseCam with a patient diagnosed with severe memory impairment was extremely positive; periodic review of images of events recorded by SenseCam resulted in significant recall of those events. Following this, a great deal of work has been undertaken to explore this phenomenon and there are early indications that SenseCam technology may be beneficial to a variety of patients with physical and mental health problems, and is valuable as a tool for investigating normal memory through behavioural and neuroimaging means. Elsewhere, it is becoming clear that judicious use of SenseCam ...

This paper describes wearable interfaces for augmenting human memory, i.e., providing users with functions for archiving, transporting, exchanging, and retrieving their experiences by employing real world objects as memory storage, in everyday life. A user conceptually encloses his/her experiences gathered through his/her sense organs into real world objects by simply touching the objects. He/she can also disclose and experience for himself/herself the augmented memories stored in an object by the same operation. This paper presents the following two wearable modules/interfaces for augmenting human memory: the "Ubiquitous Memories" and the "I'm Here!" The Ubiquitous Memories provides users with the functions for associating augmented memories with real world objects. The "I'm Here!" retrieves the last recorded augmented memory which contains the target object indicated by the user by automatically and continuously detecting objects held by the...

Spatial memory is a crucial part of our lives. Spatial memory research and rehabilitation in humans is typically performed either in real environments, which is challenging practically, or in Virtual Reality (VR), which has limited realism. Here we explored the use of Augmented Reality (AR) for studying spatial cognition. AR combines the best features of real and VR paradigms by allowing subjects to learn spatial information in a flexible fashion while walking through a real-world environment. To compare these methods, we had subjects perform the same spatial memory task in VR and AR settings. Although subjects showed good performance in both, subjects reported that the AR task version was significantly easier, more immersive, and more fun than VR. Importantly, memory performance was significantly better in AR compared to VR. Our findings validate that integrating AR can lead to improved techniques for spatial memory research and suggest their potential for rehabilitation.

In this paper we aim to explore how memories can be tied to the context in which they take form and how the process of remembering can be triggered by spatial cues. Through two usage scenarios, we propose the concept of a mobile application that is able to enhance the reminiscence of past episodes, by mapping them on the places in which they happened. The final aim is to provide a " qualitative " representation of the user's spaces, where their physical properties, such as sizes and distances, are merged with user's personal experiences, emotions, values and priorities.

Film and video have become important means of providing a visual record of reminiscence activity. Stemming from a small research project using iPads to support reminiscence work, during which video footage was shot, the paper questions whether the camera can be simply adopted as a note-taking device or is there a greater potential to be explored in our use of audio- visual media that can expand our knowledge of how people reminisce?