My own aircraft has a Garmin 196 gps and a Stationmaster engine monitor, no exactly state of the art but;
The GPS stores my last 15 hours worth of track data, including time and all manor of other bits which can be downloaded to Navbox and Flitelog as required. The Stratomaster stores the last 15 min of engine parameters (about 20 items).
I do not think this is a huge step forward for flight safety, but the engine data alone could be very valuable in proving why it failed and allowing mods to stop it happening again.
Rod1