Capturing and Sharing Human Digital Memories with the Aid of Ubiquitous Peer– to–Peer Mobile Services

The explosion of mobile computing and the sharing of content ubiquitously has enabled users to create and share memories instantly. Access to different data sources, such as location, movement, and physiology, has helped to create a data rich society where new and enhanced memories will form part of everyday life. Peer–to–Peer (P2P) systems have also increased in popularity over the years, due to their ad hoc and decentralized nature. Mobile devices are “smarter” and are increasingly becoming part of P2P systems; opening up a whole new dimension for capturing, sharing and interacting with enhanced human digital memories. This will require original and novel platforms that automatically compose data sources from ubiquitous ad-hoc services that are prevalent within the environments we occupy. This is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it will allow digital memories to be created that include richer information, such as how you felt when the memory was created and how you made others feel. Secondly, it provides a set of core services that can more easily manage and incorporate new sources as and when you are available. In this way memories created in the same location, and time are not necessarily similar – it depends on the data sources that are accessible. This paper presents DigMem, the initial prototype that is being developed to utilize distributed mobile services. DigMem captures and shares human digital memories, in a ubiquitous P2P environment. We present a case study to validate the implementation and evaluate the applicability of the approach