A Digital Life

New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear--and even things they cannot sense--and to store all these data in a personal digital archive
By Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell

I’ve been reading and hearing about the possibility of recording your entire life. Every second, every word and every image. It just takes cheap cameras (still and video), microphones, storage, and most importantly, software. Software is the critical piece of the pie to actually make use of the mountains of data that would be captured. Well, I had no idea these guys over at Microsoft have been working on this for years. How nice will it be to have a small window pop up in your eye glasses giving you the name, some brief summary points from past conversations (kids, alma matter, hobbies, etc) of the “old friend” you just bumped into (at a grocery store, networking event, etc.)? How about all the medical insights of continually monitored patients and the physiological impacts of various environments and stimuli? It was great to find a succinct overview of the potential of this idea from Scientific American. Check it out!