Reflecting health: smart mirrors for personalized medicine

Inexpensive embedded computing and the related Internet of Things technologies enable the recent development of smart products that can respond to human needs and improve everyday tasks in an attempt to make traditional environments more “intelligent”. Several projects have augmented mirrors for a range of smarter applications in automobiles and homes. The opportunity to apply smart mirror technology to healthcare to predict and to monitor aspects of health and disease is a natural but mostly underdeveloped idea. We envision that smart mirrors comprising a combination of intelligent hardware and software could identify subtle, yet clinically relevant changes in physique and appearance. Similarly, a smart mirror could record and evaluate body position and motion to identify posture and movement issues, as well as offer feedback for corrective actions. Successful development and implementation of smart mirrors for healthcare applications will require overcoming new challenges in engineering, machine learning, computer vision, and biomedical research. This paper examines the potential uses of smart mirrors in healthcare and explores how this technology might benefit users in various medical environments. We also provide a brief description of the state-of-the-art, including a functional prototype concept developed by our group, and highlight the directions to make this device more mainstream in health-related applications.