Assignment 3 – Tony

These two papers mainly focused on how to design a wearable system with a software agent, a heads-up display, a one-hand chording keyboard, and IR sensors sensing preseted beacons, named Remembrance Assistant (RA). RA is capable of proactively monitoring a user’s contextual activities and pushing just in time information.

RA automatically makes “notes” related to a user’s contexts by recognizing people’s faces whom the user is talking to and by sensing beacons which surround. The user can also type in “notes” with the one-hand chording keyboard. RA exports outputs which generated by the soft agent equipping designed algorithms calculating correlations between notes and contexts and shows them on the heads-up display.

We can say the intentional type-in information, the facial recognition and preseted location beacons are kind of explicit contexts. Rather than that, I am more interested in how to incorporate implicit contextual information, such as environmental atmosphere, personal emotion and physical condition to predict users’ needs. These will make the wearable assistant more embedded as being part of our mind instead of being part of our body.