A context aware, mobile system providing memory support for ageing people

In the fields of psychology and physiology there are studies that relate ageing to the difficulty of transferring information from short term memory to medium term memory. This difficulty causes a reduction in personal everyday's efficiency and generates heavy frustration as things to do tend to come to mind with no relation to the user current environment. We claim that it is possible to reduce this phenomenon and thus to increase personal efficiency and remove the related frustration by providing to the users timely information about which activity can be efficiently performed in his current environment and position. In this paper we describe the prototype of a system capable of gathering user needs from verbal commands, translate those needs into queries to a GIS, build a map of locations of interest for the user expressed needs and provide timely prompts as soon as the user current environment guarantees the possibility to efficiently perform an action that satisfies one of the identified needs.