A camera you can wear as a pendant to record every moment of your life will soon be launched by a UK-based firm.

Originally invented to help jog the memories of people with Alzheimer's disease, it might one day be used by consumers to create "lifelogs" that archive their entire lives.

That's from a short article in NewScientist magazine. Here's more:

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.

Later generations of this technology almost certainly will allow both audio and video recording in addition to still photos. Someday, even, it might be possible to create recordings that will play back in a virtual reality environment, enabling the user to essentially re-experience complete scenes from earlier in life.

Besides its obvious value in aiding victims of memory loss, something like this potentially could be used for gathering data to be used in re-creating a personality embedded in silicon, if that should ever prove viable.

So, are you ready to try it? Would you like to have a visual record of everything you see and do?

When a similar question was put to the readers of the TechCrunch website, here is how they responded:





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