1. Introduction

The frailties of human memory have led to a huge diversity of memory assistants, from paper diaries to complex electronic organisers. However, there are many circumstances where the explicit conversion of information to and from text, with storage in a text-based system, is neither desirable nor practical. This is especially true where the user is occupied with another task. It is these limitations of existing systems that the project will address, by helping with the memory of pictures and sounds rather than written text.

The project is associated with the photographic company Kodak who would like to apply their digital imaging technology to the area of memory assistants. Their request was to:

"...develop a specification and design for a "Digital Memory". This is a personal, unobtrusive, wearable memory aid that can capture, store and retrieve images and sounds...".

Since Kodak is a commercial company, there is little point in developing a system that nobody is interested in buying - no matter how technically impressive. Therefore the project focuses on one specific set of potential users - the security services - with whom to validate the design. The work of a security officer involves dealing with time-critical situations - from investigating a fire alarm to disarming an attacker. This makes their using a traditional memory assistant particularly difficult.

The aim of the project is to design a computer-based memory assistant for the security services. It should be easy to use and have the following functions:

• Automatically provide information - such as alarm codes - when required, without distracting the user from his task.
• Automatically record events - places, pictures and sounds.
• Provide a mechanism for examining the record of events.

This dissertation will describe the requirements analysis for all parts of the system. The multimedia interface has been taken to the paper and hi-fidelity prototyping stages, and has undergone user and heuristic evaluation.

Following this introduction, chapter 2 discusses the user group, examining the work and problems of security officers, along with the areas where their work could be supported by a computer based system. Chapter 3 examines the background to the current project, both existing artefacts and human factors. Chapter 4 documents the design process relating to the device and the software, including methodological issues and relevant analyses. Chapter 5 specifies the hardware and functionality of the device, and the writing of the software prototype. Chapter 6 records the evaluation process, from generating test data by producing a video, to the results of user and heuristic evaluations. Finally, there is a discussion of some of the issues raised by the project in chapter 7, with a brief conclusion in chapter 8.