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

The recent developments in mobile devices may be exploited to deliver to human users a host of efficiency enhancement services. Among all the possible services, we argue that support for human memory is definitely a critical one, as a matter of fact memory is at the basis of most cognitive skills. The building of a service capable of supporting human memory requires complex computational tasks that are still beyond the capabilities of current mobile devices, however the ready availability of 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 different components of the 4W (what-where-when-who) project and its reference implementation system. The system provides a service capable of mitigating the negative effects of stress or aging on the memorization capability of humans leveraging both client side and server side state of the art solutions. The 4W (what-where-whenwho) prototype is capable of capturing user needs and to-dos, reason to identify where those needs and tasks can be fulfilled/performed in an efficient way and provide timely and localized 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, thus we present of our results and we provide a discussion of our findings.