Autometa: Geo-reminders and Automation

As humans, we deal with a multitude of complex tasks in our everyday lives. With the amount of work pressure and social commitments, we strive to strike a balance between the two. Juggling between our daily activities, we tend to forget somethings every once in a while. Autometa is a step towards helping you fight your short-term memory issues.

INTRODUCTION

Autometa helps solve memory related problems such as forgetting to notify family and friends of your arrival, forgetting to email peers about delays in meetings due to locational unavailability and forgetting to pick up grocery even while near a grocery store. Autometa is an Android app that triggers reminders and automates text-based events (SMS) based on the user’s location and radius. Users can also choose to delay events within 60 seconds from the time of automation trigger.

The average adult forgets three key facts, chores or events every day, according to a study by National-Lottery.co.uk

FORGETFULNESS IS PERSISTENT

According to a study by National-Lottery.co.uk, the third most forgetful thing among humans is going to a store and forgetting what you came for. One way to battle this is to write your grocery list on a piece of paper. But what if you don't carry your paper? Or what if you pass by the store on your way back to work but forget to pick up that loaf of bread or that carton of milk?

According to Wikipedia, The forgetting curve hypothesizes the decline of memory retention in time. This curve shows how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it.[1] A related concept is the strength of memory that refers to the durability that memory traces in the brain. The stronger the memory, the longer period of time that a person is able to recall it. A typical graph of the forgetting curve purports to show that humans tend to halve their memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they consciously review the learned material.

TACKLE FORGETFULNESS

What is innovative about Autometa is that while some apps do exist which provide location-based reminders, there’s no app which carries out automation such as texting or sending an email based on location. Autometa would not only provide an existing feature in a better form but also provide additional useful features in one single app. 

USAGE

Just install the beta app from the Google Play Store and follow the simple on-screen instructions. Users can choose between setting a reminder and sending an SMS at the moment (email support is reserved for a production release). Pick your own location or find one from among 16 different categories including supermarket, pharmacy, gas station, bank, etc. and set up a radius from as small as a 100 meters to as large as 50 kilometers and let the app take care of the rest.

TECHNOLOGIES

Autometa is built on Google's Android platform using some awesome technologies and is available immediately for beta testing. The app makes use of the concept of geofencing and geolocation which is carried out using Google Android Geofence API. The location choosing options make use of Google Places API for Android for location picking and a custom algorithm to get places by categories using Google Places API for Web and plots it on the application map on Android. For a more detailed and in-depth understanding and to check out a tonne of more work that went behind the making of this app, check out my GitHub (link down below).

LINKS

Check out the beta app here and report any bugs on the Play Store or raise an issue on GitHub.

Check out the demo video on YouTube

Fully open source code on GitHub

Devpost entry

View more projects of mine on my GitHub and my Website

CONCLUSION

At this point, Autometa is certainly not fully developed and more of a helping aid. However, it has great potential and can help you potentially save some valuable time by helping you remember to buy those the eggs next time you cross your favorite grocery store or send an SMS to alert your friend of your arrival while you can keep your hands on the wheels and concentrate on reaching there safely.

The future of Autometa is bright. Imagine switching on your thermostat when you're almost home or switching off the lights as soon as you leave home. The possibilities are endless. Location-based automation is a very useful concept and ongoing development will help achieve total autonomy.