Using physical context for just-in-time information retrieval

Jimminy is a wearable personal note-taking and note-archival application that automatically displays notes that might be relevant to the wearer in his current environment. The system selects old notes to show on a head-up display based on the wearer's current location, people in the immediate area, and the subject-line and contents of any current notes being written. This paper describes an experiment that evaluates the usefulness of the wearer's physical context (location and people in the area) for automatically finding useful archived information. The results suggest that, while physical context can be used to discover useful archived notes, the subject and text of notes currently being entered are a much better indicator of usefulness in the personal note-taking domain.