Wize Mirror May Soon Offer Health Consumers A Way To Detect Disease Risk Simply By Looking At Your Reflection

The mirror will assess health status by examining the person’s face, looking at fatty tissue, facial expressions and how flushed or pale they are, including 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.

“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.