Towards a Framework for Capturing and Distributing Rich Interactive Human Digital Memories

The area of human digital memories has placed considerable focus on documenting the things we do, the places we visit and the thoughts we think. Rather than sharing important events face–to–face, i.e. by watching home videos together or looking through photo albums, people tend to share their memories with each other through emails or text messages, or by posting them online. The difficulty is that the vast amounts of data we collect are often difficult to access and less meaningful to us over time. The challenge is to structure human digital memories in a way that can be easily distributed and recollected at different time periods in our lives. More specifically, the collection and organisation of memory-related information (images, video, physiological data and so on) needs to occur using ubiquitous ad hoc services, prevalent within the environments we occupy. This is likely to happen without us necessarily being aware that memories are being created. This will remove the need to manage the growing number of information sources that require conventional tools to achieve this, for example, a camera to take stills and video. This paper posits a new and novel idea that builds on the nomadic nature of people, ubiquitous computing, context awareness, physiological computing, semantic annotation and ad hoc networking that will allow rich interactive digital memories to be created amongst individuals and their environments that are unobtrusive to individuals