A WEARABLE camera that automatically snaps thousands of photos of the people you meet, the places you go, the things you do and even the food you eat is proving to be a powerful aid for people with impaired memory.
Called SenseCam, the gadget was developed by Lyndsay Williams at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK. It is part of the companyās ālife-loggingā programme, which comes up with technologies for recording and storing details of a personās daily life (New ŠÓ°ÉŌ““, 4 October 2003, p 28).
Worn like a necklace, the prototype camera is the size of a deck of cards, and has an ultra-wide-angle fisheye lens. For up to 12 hours at a time, its two AA batteries let it snap as many as 2000 64-kilobyte photographs. They are stored in the cameraās 128-megabyte flash memory.
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Sensors enable the camera to work out when to take a photo. An accelerometer senses when the user starts or stops moving ā triggering a snapshot ā and an infrared sensor registers body heat, so anyone standing within 2 metres of the camera will have their photo taken. A light sensor causes the camera to take a picture when the wearer moves indoors or outdoors, and a microphone triggers a photo whenever the ambient sound level rises by 6 decibels. The images can easily be uploaded onto a computer hard drive or an online diary.
Now neuropsychologists Narinder Kapur and Emma Berry at Addenbrookeās Hospital in Cambridge, UK, have found that SenseCam can help patients with certain memory disorders caused by injury or conditions such as cancer. āMost memory aids we use, such as paper diaries and pagers, remind patients what to do in the future. We wondered if SenseCam could help them remember their past,ā says Berry.
Preliminary results from a trial of 20 patients show that SenseCam can help restore memories of a night out, a trip to a golf course or a holiday, when patientsā partners or carers play back their day to them in still images.
āOne patient, after watching the images three times, can then permanently remember the event without having to see the pictures again,ā says Berry, although no one is quite sure why. āItās as if some of the patients are storing the memories but are not able to retrieve them without the aid of the images,ā says. āCues always help.ā
āItās showing some promise for some patients with some symptoms,ā says Kapur. But itās early days, he warns, cautioning that the device would be of little use to patients with Alzheimerās or similar forms of dementia, whose ability to store memories is impaired.
