Mike Treder at IEET writes a little about a new device from a UK company that is essentially a camera worn around the neck, photographing every significant moment of our lives.

Worn on a cord around the neck, the camera takes pictures automatically as often as once every 30 seconds. It also uses an accelerometer and light sensors to snap an image when a person enters a new environment, and an infrared sensor to take one when it detects the body heat of a person in front of the wearer. It can fit 30,000 images onto its 1-gigabyte memory.

The ViconRevue was originally developed as the SenseCam by Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, for researchers studying Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Studies showed that reviewing the events of the day using SenseCam photos could help some people improve long-term recall.

Mike predicts that we might have devices like this that take video as well, and not on light- or location-triggers, but all the time. This would be useful, he says, for re-living past experiences (and for “gathering data to be used in re-creating a personality embedded in silicon”, whatever that means).

In a similar vein, Wired has a review of the Fitbit Fitness and Sleep Tracker, a beefed-up pedometer with a triaxial accelerometer and a computer docking station. The Fitbit clips to your clothes and tracks how far and how fast you move, how you sleep, and the accompanying web interface lets you input calories consumed to complement calories expended. Interestingly, the Fitbit has a focus on data, metrics and trends for everything it tracks.

This is an interesting trend that I think will become more and more prevalent. Combine these devices, or allow them to gather data in a standardized way, and you can get a pretty accurate picture of of someone’s doings. Combine with a GPS receiver, a heartrate monitor, perhaps a light-level sensor, etc and that’s a whole lot of data that could be mined for interesting patterns.