Every moment remembered

These days, most folks in the western world carry a smart-phone with them at all times, enabling them not only to talk and text, but to also capture images of their friends and family.

Many such people, of course, only haul out their smart-phones to take a snap when they feel that the picture that they are taking is important enough to justify doing so. But the folks at Memoto (Linköping, Sweden) believe that because of that, many important moments in an individual's life might well be lost.

To rectify the situation, the engineers there have developed a miniature 36 x 36 x 9 mm wearable camera that a captures images continuously, creating a visual log of the life of the user.

Memoto itself was founded by six Swedish serial entrepreneurs just last year. Martin Källström, formerly founder and CEO of blog search engine Twingly, came up with the concept of the Memoto camera. To develop it further, he recruited his friend Oskar Kalmaru, founder of an online video provider, as well as Björn Wesén, who was, at the time, a freelance electronic design engineer.

The Memoto GPS-enabled weatherproof camera they have created has no buttons. While a user is wearing it, it takes two timed geotagged photos a minute, enabling a user to immediately review when and where he or she was when the image was taken.

Now there are some who might regard such a device as only pandering to the needs of individuals who are egotistical enough to believe that every moment of their lives should be recorded for posterity.

On the other hand, such cameras might prove extremely useful in certain industrial or security applications. I'm sure that many companies, for example, would be only too delighted to attach such cameras to their employees, so they might track their activities on a daily basis. And the police could certainly use them to tag known offenders and capture a visual log of their activities to ensure that they weren’t involved in any nefarious businesses.

If you would like to purchase one of the wearable cameras -- which come in three colors - orange, graphite grey and arctic white -- they can now be pre-ordered at the company web site for the price of $279.00.

Personally, I wouldn't have much use for one, unless I wanted to capture hours of images of the PC screen in front of which I sit for most of the day writing news and features for Vision Systems Design.