I recently bought Fitbit, a little bluetooth dongle that acts as a combination pedometer and fitness trainer. It’s pretty fantastic, not only because it tracks so many things but because it’s convenient. It’s about the size of a pack of gum (the kind you’d find at the bottom of a vending machine) and it can strap to your hip via belt clip or arm via arm strap.

More importantly though, because it tracks what I eat and what I do throughout the day and spirits all the information online it allows me to compare myself against myself along with other Fitbit users. It keeps me honest. Honest in the same way the Mint keeps me honest about my finances. While Fitbit hasn’t changed my life, it has certainly guided me towards small improvements in my diet and exercise that will have long term benefits.

What does that have to do with Jigsaw? Everything, dear Watson, everything. Jigsaw is an application that, like Fitbit, tracks your every move and tells you about it. What makes this unique is that it also makes predictions about what you’re actually doing, and lets you send those activities out to your social network. What’s even better is that the software can be loaded into your smart phone, so you don’t even have to lug an additional piece of techno-wizardry around with you in order to take advantage of it.

There is a really interesting future in the “personal sensor” arena. Where small, easy to conceal devices allow us to keep better tabs on how we’re doing and track over time how we are living our lives. I can see sensors for pollution or radiation exposure, disease or virus contamination, general health and well being and even specialized sensors for people with high blood pressure or heart disease. While some of these already exist, they will get smaller, cheaper and more digitally connected, providing us with rich sources of data (for good and for ill) about ourselves and how we compare to the world.

CAN’T be bothered to tell your Facebook friends what you are up to? A smartphone app called Jigsaw can help.

Jigsaw figures out what you are doing by monitoring your phone’s microphone, GPS and accelerometer for patterns characteristic of routine activities – and it could be set to send the results to social networking sites.

More importantly, Jigsaw can log how active you are each day, producing records that could be useful to a doctor or fitness trainer. Its pattern-recognition algorithms can identify a range of behaviours, making its logs more detailed than those of similar apps, says Hong Lu at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who developed the app in collaboration with the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California.

Read Smartphone app monitors your every move (Via New Scientist)

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