When you need a not-so-subtle reminder

CAMBRIDGE, Mass5. – When Richard DeVaul sits down to his computer, he sometimes forgets to eat for hours at a time. Names slip his mind at cocktail parties and, to his embarrassment, he mixes up the faces of people he knows well.

A string on the finger might have been a solution in the past, but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student is testing a more modern lifeline for people who fumble for names, leave the stove on or forget to call Mom on her birthday.

DeVaul’s “memory glasses” are a tiny computer display clipped onto eyeglass frames and wired to a lightweight computer that can flash reminders to the wearer without, he hopes, distraction or interference with day-to-day activities.

“The things that I want help with are, in a sense, very simple,” DeVaul said. “Basic things. If I’ve been sitting in front of my computer for six hours and haven’t gotten up to eat, a little thing would remind me, ‘Rich, go take a break.’”

Chandra Narayanaswami, manager of the wearable computing group at IBM Corp.’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and the organizer of a recent conference where DeVaul presented his work, considers the memory glasses intriguing, if unproven.

“It’s not some intrusive mechanism like an alarm going off,” he said. “It looks like a promising idea. Of course, more testing would have to be done.”

The glasses are part of a computer system developed by researchers in MIT’s “Borglab” who are tackling “wearable computing” devices worn in clothes and engineered to solve day-to-day problems.

The computer project – nicknamed MIThril in reference to the light armor Frodo Baggins wears in “Lord of the Rings” – is actually three separate computers wired together inside a vest that resembles nylon pile clothing.

A smaller version of MIThril is powered by an off-the-shelf, hand-held computer made by Sharp, but that version can’t support the head display for now. Both versions run on Linux, the open-source operating system.

The tiny head-mounted display, which juts out from the side of the eyeglass frames, is wired into a video board that DeVaul built.

DeVaul, 32, hopes to program the wearable computer to cue the user with subliminal messages or images that would flash on the screen. The prompts would be too quick for the wearer to notice, but the brain would still recognize them and respond.

The systems would be “context aware,” using a global positioning system and sensors to know where users are, and cueing them only when information is needed.

The computer could be programmed, for example, to remind the wearer of topics to discuss when he or she bump into someone with whom they have unfinished business. Or to remind a doctor of medical procedures at the operating table. Or flash a list of desired movies upon entering a video store.

Subliminal messages would be safer than an overt message, because pop-up messages could distract the wearer in the middle of, say, crossing the street or driving a car, DeVaul said.

DeVaul conducted a study with 28 people in which he says subliminal cueing substantially increased their ability to recall names associated with faces. His peer-reviewed findings were presented last month at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers in White Plains, N.Y., which Narayanaswami helped organize.

The memory glasses are largely hypothetical at this point. The technology depends on MIThril’s becoming practical to wear outside the lab, creating software that would cue the user at the right time with the right information, and establishing that, in fact, subliminal cueing actually works.