Augmenting Personalized Memory via Practical Multimodal Wearable Sensing in Visual Search and Wayfinding Navigation

Working memory involves the temporary retention of information over short periods. It is a critical cognitive function that enables humans to perform various online processing tasks, such as dialing a phone number, recalling misplaced items' locations, or navigating through a store. However, inherent limitations in an individual's capacity to retain information often result in forgetting important details during such tasks. Although previous research has successfully utilized wearable and assistive technologies to enhance long-term memory functions (e.g., episodic memory), their application to supporting short-term recall in daily activities remains underexplored. To address this gap, we present Memento, a framework that uses multimodal wearable sensor data to detect significant changes in cognitive state and provide intelligent in situ cues to enhance recall. Through two user studies involving 15 and 25 participants in visual search navigation tasks, we demonstrate that participants receiving visual cues from Memento achieved significantly better route recall, improving approximately 20-23% compared to free recall. Furthermore, Memento reduced cognitive load and review time by 46% while also achieving a substantial reduction in computation time (3.86 secs vs. 15.35 secs), offering an average 75% effective compared to computer vision-based cues selection approaches.