Wearing your PIM : experiments with an audio enhanced PIM

PIM systems help organise people’s lives by providing address book, schedule and task management facilities. Current PIM’s manage this information by collecting and storing it as textual data. With the advent of the wearable computer, using text only is no longer an efficient and convenient mechanism for managing personal information. A wearable computer should use data from various sensors (video, audio, location, environmental, user state) to organise personal information. In this paper we examine how audio can be used to enhance the facilities provided by text-only PIM’s and present an example implementation of an audio based wearable PIM (wPIM) that has the capability of storing and retrieving PIM information as audio recordings. The results of the user evaluation we conducted, which was carried out outside of the laboratory, suggests that users strongly accept audio as a way to manage their personal information and to augment their memory, supporting our hypothesis that audio enhances wearable personal information management.