A bad memory for names has prompted a West Australian inventor to launch what he believes is a world-first memory-jogging device.

Peter Dyer used to mentally run through the letters of the alphabet to jog his memory when he could not put a name to a face. 
"It puzzled me why I couldn't recall these names so I put the alphabet down on paper and juggled it around until it worked for me," Mr Dyer said. 
Then he made the Memjog hand-held disk device, which he launched in Perth today. 

"It has the alphabet on an outer disc and you spin a front disc around slowly until each letter appears in a small window," he said. 

"It works on the principle that if you can prompt the brain to recall the letter of the word you are trying to recall then the word usually follows quite quickly afterwards." 

Studies showed most people suffered the frustration of being unable to recall something on the tip-of-their-tongue about once a week, Mr Dyer said. 
In trials of the Memjog device, people aged between eight and almost 80 were able to recall 80 per cent of forgotten words, he said.