Augmenting interaction in intelligent environments through open personal memories

One of the human strengths is to utilize past experiences to solve problems. This process can be technically supported by collecting and exploiting the history of a user’s interactions with an intelligent environment. However, most of today’s applications cannot or do not take on the additional burden of providing the user with sophisticated memory functionality. In this paper we present the concept of an open personal memory, which allows arbitrary applications to contribute knowledge to the memory with minimal extra effort. We describe a proof-of-concept implementation and show how users can exploit such memories.