Amnesia may occur suddenly or slowly, may effect short-term or long term memory, and may be permanent or temporary depending on the cause. We believe that patients with chronic short-term memory problems, such as those resulting from certain types of head injuries and the early stages of Alzheimer's, may significantly benefit from a proactive reminder system. However, the high-level cognitive and perceptual problems that often accompany amnesia symptoms may seriously restrict the class of patient likely to benefit. Such a setting is often present in the institutionalized care of amnesia patients, and an active-tag based implementation greatly simplifies the context sensing and classification problem. If an effective Memory Glasses implementation could be constructed for this patient group and setting, it might provide significant advantages to both patients and care providers by increasing patient independence and reducing required supervision.
Agnosia typically effects only a single sensory modality, vision being the most common.
Agnosia patients in general and prosopagnosia patients in particular present an interesting application class because the impairment is so specific. A reliable face recognizer could almost literally replace the damaged brain functionality of the prosopagnosia patient, perhaps allowing the patient to lead a normal or near-normal life. The modality and type of agnosia has interesting implications for the Memory Glasses interaction design, since the role of the application becomes the recognition of and translation from an unrecognizable perception into a recognizable one. For instance, an implementation for associative prosopagnosia might present the wearer with both a picture of the recognized face and the name, so that the wearer might compare the picture with the person and confirm recognition through visual comparison. However, an implementation for apperceptive prosopagnosia might present the wearer with name and a recorded sample of the recognized person's voice, so that the wearer could confirm the identification aurally.