"Remember This!" A New iPhone Memory App

A new iPhone app. from Smart.fm, based in Tokyo, says that the adaptive-learning algorithms behind its software can help users memorize all kinds of information. How cool is that!

The company's algorithms were inspired by research that shows people remember information more effectively they try to memorize it at key times. Those algorithms determine how often to present a piece of information to the user and in what context. Once the user has demonstrated the ability to recall that word and its meaning, this information will appear less often

To use Smart.fm, a person selects an existing list of material--a dictionary of foreign words, for instance--or starts building a new list. The list could be text-only, but the system also supports images and audio. A user might match the names of birds to the sounds they make, or view images of different parts of the human brain in order to learn how to identify them. Someone who snaps pictures of the people she meets at a conference might use the software to commit those people's names to memory.

Unlike other memory applications, Smart.fm takes a social approach, letting users share their lists and add comments to other lists. And in the future, Lewis says, there will be more ways to pull information into the system. The company is working on integrating with Freebase, a site that collects user-generated databases. Once the effort is complete, Smart.fm users who are interested in a particular topic should be able to access information about it from Freebase automatically.

"Education apps are one of the most interesting and growing areas of the iPhone app store," says Carl Howe, an analyst focusing on mobile research at the Yankee Group. Howe thinks Smart.fm was wise to broaden the scope of its material beyond just language learning. For education apps, he says, "the central aspect is knowing how to engage people's interest."

Via The MIT Technology Review

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