Sensors and Wearable Technologies for Cognitive Aid

Dear Colleagues,

When it comes to nutritional science and sports activities, we tend to have a pretty good understanding of how to manage and optimize our bodies. The same is not necessarily true for our cognitive abilities, such as alertness, focus, and memory. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”, so goes the famous managerial quote by Peter Drucker. While tracking activities, such as step counting, are relatively straightforward, surrogate measures are required to detect and quantify cognitive states.

Awareness of current, in situ, and more systematic fluctuations of cognitive states is a prerequisite for understanding, changing, and managing our cognitive resources. For a long time, we have used aids to outsource cognitive tasks and compensate for the fallacies of our own perceptual and cognitive abilities: Optical lenses have been used to sharpen the blurry and transpire the invisible. Calendars help us to organize our lives, alarms remind us of chores, and pictures let us dwell on past experiences. These aids are widely used and socially accepted. They are customizable yet not individually tailored to their users’ cognitive abilities.

Continuous progress has been made in utilizing medical-grade as well as low-cost sensors to quantify a more wholesome image of our physical and cognitive activities. This includes a wide range of sensors people already carry with them. They sense the environment, including time, temperature, and noise levels and collect information from their users, such as motion, heart-rate, and emotion. These developments present a range of opportunities for researchers and application developers to explore the realm of cognitive aid technology.

We invite manuscripts for this forthcoming Special Issue on research and applications that drive the development of technologies to assist and augment human perception, cognition, and memory. We seek contributions in quantifying cognitive functions through sensors and wearable technologies built to enhance memory, boost alertness, augment perception, and support learning, just to name a few. We are interested in cutting-edge sensing approaches that provide a window into our cognitive processes, new applications of emerging technologies that foster cognitive well-being, and devices that support cognition in unobtrusive and continuous ways.

Dr. Tilman Dingler
Dr. Francisco Kiss
Dr. Benjamin Tag
Prof. Dr. Koichi Kise
Guest Editors

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