Michael (Mik) Lamming is an inventor. He has spent his career pursuing “far-out” ideas for commercial and government laboratories. In 1982, at Xerox PARC he invented Digital Darkroom, the first digital photography system for a personal computer.  He went on to established the UbiComp Research Group at Xerox EuroPARC in Cambridge, UK, patenting several fundamental ideas in the field of context, and activity-based computing, and spinning off a company in the process.  

Pursuing the "crazy idea" that computers might soon be small enough to wear, his team broke new ground in wearable devices, in an area they called activity recognition systems. In 1992 they demonstrated a wearable device called Forget-me-not, the first context-sensing human memory aid.  For this work he received the Xerox President's Award. He taught user-interface design at U. Cambridge, and co-authoring a popular textbook on Interactive System Design. He was appointed Distinguished Scientist at HP Labs in Palo Alto where he demonstrated how a tiny wearable device could be employed to detect slow, and subtle changes in human patterns of behavior, providing an early warning for several degenerative diseases. 

Now retired, he continues this research building novel in-home activity sensing systems with a view to logging his own aging process.  Will one of these prove to be the much vaunted, yet long-awaited “wearable killer app”.