The Journal of mHealth Vol 2 issue 5 (Oct) | Page 14

Industry News

Smart Mirror Monitors Your Face for
Telltale Signs of Disease
Wize Mirror looks like a mirror, but
incorporates 3D scanners, multispectral
cameras and gas sensors to assess the
health of someone looking into it. It
does this by examining the person’s face,
looking at fatty tissue, facial expressions
and how flushed or pale they are.
Facial recognition software looks for telltale markers of stress or anxiety, while
the gas sensors take samples of the user’s
breath looking for compounds that give
an indication of how much they drink
or smoke. The 3D scanners analyse face
shape to spot weight gain or loss, while
the multispectral cameras can estimate
heart rate or haemoglobin levels.
After the software has analysed the
face – which only takes about a minute
– the mirror produces a score that tells
the user how healthy they seem. It also
displays personalised advice on how to
improve their health.
Wize Mirror is being developed by a
consortium of researchers and industry

partners from seven European Union
countries, with EU funding. Sara Colantonio and colleagues from the National
Research Council of Italy, which coordinates the project, want to use Wize Mirror to address common long-term health
issues that are difficult to treat once
something has already gone wrong, like
heart disease or diabetes.
Need for prevention
“Prevention is the most viable approach
to reduce the socio-economic burden of
chronic and widespread diseases, such as
cardiovascular and metabolic diseases,”
they write.
Clinical trials of the device will begin
next year at three sites in France and
Italy, aiming to compare its readings with
those from traditional medical devices.
Consumer technology that can read signals from the body to interpret underlying physical and mental health is on the
cusp of becoming part of everyday life.
For example, Cardiio, originally devel-

oped at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, i