4th Panel Report
Memories for Life Research For Those Who Need It
The final panel of the day discussed Medical Applications of Memories for Life Research, although Alan Newell suggested it should be retitled Memories for Life Research for Those Who Need It. The aim was to discuss the ways that M4L research can help those who need memory support, who are often people unfamiliar with and uninterested in computers. The panel included not only Alan Newell (University of Dundee), but also Norman Alm (University of Dundee), Emma Berry (Microsoft) and Tilly Mortimore (University of Southampton).
Alan Newell (download PowerPoint slides) ] from Dundee University was interested in supporting the aging population. Getting old is a "real" phenomenon and happens to all of us. Up until this point all of the presentations have been targeted at people with PhD's in computer science. 55% of population do not have emails. 90% of population do not use or have not ever used the web. It is these people who will get the greatest benefit from the M4L agenda – if the technology can serve them.
Alan then went on to stress that there is a different social context when considering the older generation. He is interested in developing cognitive prostheses to support memory in old age. He presented two forms of prostheses: prospective and immediate.
Prospective Prostheses: Where individuals are reminded of actions they mean to take in the future, such as cancelling a paper round, or taking medicine.
Immediate Prostheses: Which would help in supporting questions such as: "what is this person’s name, or why am I here?"
Alan then points out that there has yet to be any mention of storing or utilising video or audio data. Research into efficient ways of searching through large amount of audio and video data is needed. As mentioned in the previous discussions, an important question is how we know what information to store.
Alan also identified narrative as a central theme to the M4L research agenda. M4L could be used to support story telling, autobiographical stories for therapeutic or entertainment purposes. He pointed out that the data gathered over a person’s lifetime could also be used to automatically generate obituaries. We are all stories. In order to generate compelling narratives techniques must be developed to identify the salient features of a person’s life. These features need to be combined, using expertise taken from scriptwriters and biographers, into autobiographical narratives.
Alan also presented M4L as a way of supporting and advertising a person’s perceived competence: to help answer questions such as "who was I/who am I?" so that people know how to deal with them in a social situation. He concluded by stating that it is important to distinguish between stimulating/supporting and replacing memories when considering the any future research agenda.
Norman Alm (download PowerPoint slides) of Dundee University presented work focused on how M4L could be used to support people suffering from dementia. Norman began by pointing out that we are an ever-aging population, and as a result the number of people suffering from dementia will also increase.
Norman then went on to describe CIRCA, the Computer Interactive Reminiscence Conversation Aid, developed at Dundee, which is used to stimulate long-term memory. The tool helps activate long-term memory by steering the user through a hypermedia presentation of generic memories local to the user’s place of residence. The act of steering the user’s long-term memory is used to probe his/her long-term memory to stimulate activity in the brain. This process does not cure dementia; it just exploits the brain’s remaining functionality to help make the dementia patient feel more comfortable.
Norman perceives the lifelog generated by M4L as a way to help people with virtually no short-term memory reminisce the now forgotten memories; he envisages a system similar to the CIRCA system to help stimulate fading memories.
Emma Berry, from Microsoft Research presented their work with the SenseCam. The application Emma presents is a photo-based diary, which is intended to aid the autobiographical memory of patients with severe memory impairments. The SenseCam periodically takes images based on movement, changes in temperature, and changes in lighting. Most conventional memory aids, e.g. notebooks and calendars, are used to support prospective memory; but it is unusual to have an aid for recollection.
Emma elaborated on the application of the system. It aims to capture the context of autobiographical memory, so that a user may relive events of their life. For example, a patient may "know" that they went to Cambridge because they have been told so, but they may have no way of "remembering" this. The SenseCam allows for its users to remember; if they wish to have "memories" in the form of images they can go back and revisit, they can wear their SenseCam. This supports the generation of "memories" albeit prosthetic ones. Emma went onto describe some experiments they have performed that included asking the users about whether they believe that their memory got better since wearing the SenseCam. The patients said that they used the images "as cues for their memory" and also used language such as "I remember doing that, or I remember this event" while viewing pictures. Emma stressed the ubiquitous nature of the SenseCam, and how this was central to the system’s success. Emma concluded with a testimonial of one of the patients using the system, which read: "Seeing these images provides me with a cue for accessing memories, which otherwise wouldn’t have been retrievable".
The presentation by Tilly Mortimore (download PowerPoint slides), from the University of Southampton, revolved around issues surrounding the support of dyslexic students. Tilly described the need for neuroscience research and how it is being used to drive education about vulnerable people. Advances in neuroscience and psychology have driven and aided research into supporting the teaching of vulnerable people. Research has identified a number of different cognitive or learning styles, which are now helping dyslexic people through education. This is helping to answer questions about whether graphical or verbal information is more useful, and feeding through into teaching styles and teaching methods. An example of a problem faced by dyslexic people is fact retention and the utilisation of information, faced not only in academia and school, but also during everyday lives. Tilly presented her view of the challenges which the M4L research agenda should face:
- How to use neuroscientific information about memory problems?
- How to store this information to facilitate retrieval?
- How to put a human in the technological loop?
Alan Dix asked whether or not there was any potential for people to develop any of their deficient abilities when using SenseCam, i.e. if there is any scope for people to overcome their memory issues. Emma responded by stating that there is some loose evidence to support such a claim, but there is no strong evidence to say that the brain improves or creates any more functionality. But they are working with various partners to investigate whether such a claim is at all viable.
She stressed that we still do not know whether or not being shown images of irretrievable memories would distress a user. So at early stages of dementia a reminiscing system could be helpful, but only at an early stage, later on it could become too stressful for the patient to be shown images of events they should remember but cannot.
A question was posed regarding methods of sorting and searching the vast number of images taken by the SenseCam. Gareth Jones described how the team at Dublin City University is trying to identify "landmark images", the salient images of the day, to aid recall of important events in your life. He went on to state that automating this is important given the growth of personal digital photography.
Emma was asked whether any experiments have been undertaken to utilise sound as well as pictures, and she answered by describing how Microsoft have started experiments with sounds and images, and how they will perform image retrieval experiments involving smells as well, which are also known to be very evocative.