Reconstructing the Past: Personal Memory Technologies Are Not Just Personal and Not Just for Memory

Abstract

Research has shown that personal memory technologies are a promising way to address the needs of older adults with memory impairments. In this article, we review three recently completed studies that evaluated technologies for personal memories intended for persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In the first study, we worked with 12 participants with AD or MCI and their families to construct DVD-based Multimedia Biographies that depicted prominent events, people, and places from the participant's past. We then evaluated over a period of 6 months psychosocial effects that viewing the biographies had on the participants and their family members. These effects included stimulating reminiscence of past events, triggering predominantly positive emotions of happiness and occasional moments of sadness, and engaging conversations with family members. In our second study, we designed a home-based ambient display that allowed a man with AD to similarly review his past life, in combination with recent photos automatically captured by a lifelogging device called SenseCam. Psychometric tests and semistructured interviews revealed how the intervention appeared to improve the participant's sense of self and lower apathy. In our final study of 5 cognitively impaired participants we compared representations of recent experiences captured with SenseCam in 3 ways: with the raw image stream, with a slide show consisting of a selected number of SenseCam images narrated by a family member, and with a control reviewing no images. Results included evidence that reviewing SenseCam images improved episodic recall for personal events depicted in the images for 4 of the 5 participants.

Based on lessons learned from this research, we suggest that personal memory technologies should not just be framed as systems for augmenting an individual user's capacity for accurate recall of personal events, but instead should support groups of people such as members of a family in telling their life stories. This conception yields benefits beyond the support of memory, such as fostering a sense of self and strengthening interpersonal relationships with family members. We conclude the article by presenting design considerations to help guide and inform the development and evaluation of future “personal memory” technologies.

Notes

¹Our first two studies have been previously reported, and only a selection of major results and lessons learned are included in this article. Our third study has not been previously reported, and results are presented here for the first time.

Acknowledgments. We are grateful to Steve Hodges, Emma Berry, Georgina Browne, Gavin Smyth, Yaakov Stern, Peter Watson, and Ken Wood for guidance and encouragement; to Fady Akladios, Aha Blume, Sarah Chatland, Kante Easley, Anoop Ganda, Isabel Lam, Natalie Langlois, Simona Mindy, Kristin Ramdeem, Karen Louise Smith, Brandon Vasquez, Mark Watson, and Martin Yeung for research assistance; and to Alan Smeaton and Aiden Doherty for use of their image-processing package. We recognize the work of Elsa Marziali (co-primary investigator on the Multimedia Biographies project) and Renee Climans, who initially explored the development of multimedia histories of persons with AD, and Thecla Daminakis for her work on the Multimedia Biography project. We thank the anonymous reviewers of Human–Computer Interaction for their comments. Most important, we thank all the project participants and their families.

Support. The Multimedia Biographies project was financially supported by the Alzheimer's Association and Intel Corporation. We are grateful for financial support from Microsoft Research for the third project.

HCI Editorial Record. First manuscript received December 13, 2010. Revision received June 20, 2011. Accepted by Elise van den Hoven. Final manuscript received December 15, 2011. — Editor