'Senior moments': loss and context

Everyone occasionally experiences momentary confusion about the intent of an action in the midst of doing an ordinary task ("Why did I come into this room?"). As we age, these momentary confusions, referred to here by the colloquial term senior moments become more frequent. Lapses of this sort can also be the result of specific cognitive degeneration associated with aging and can have an impact on day-to-day living that ranges from annoying to incapacitating. This paper discusses the current understanding of senior moments in relation to cognitive decline and depicts scenarios depicting typical instances of them and common sense techniques to repair the memory slips. We present a discussion of the challenges involved in the design of a computationally based system for supporting lapse remediation, and specific implementation issues involved in providing such a system