Quantifying your wellness got easier this year at CES, the largest consumer electronic show in the world. The Anura MagicMirror, made by digital health company NuraLogix, is the first mirror of its kind that analyzes the blood flow in your face to check vitals like blood pressure and estimate your risk of heart disease. It also guesses your age based on your skin, as well as how stressed you might be.
You get this information by simply sitting down in front of the mirror, aligning your face with prompts on the 21.5-inch screen and holding still while the mirror’s patented Transdermal Optical Imaging technology scans your face. There is no video, but your data is sent to the cloud, where it’s analyzed. It’s then displayed as different wellness metrics, which even include what the company says are metabolic risk assessments like those for fatty liver disease and Type 2 diabetes. To see how it’s done, watch this video of CNET trying it hands-on.
NuraLogix, which has an app for phones using the technique, says the mirror won’t be marketed toward consumers for home use, at least right now. Instead, you could soon see it in gyms, clinics, businesses and other places people are monitoring their health and may not mind sitting down in front of a mirror to do so.
Caveats, perspective and the increasingly wonky world of wellness tech
Like other wellness devices meant to give you insight into your health, the MagicMirror isn’t a medical device, and you shouldn’t take its measurements as a diagnosis — especially when its ratings could theoretically be thrown by factors as subtle as wearing makeup, lighting, your ability to sit still and the like.
But the company has submitted the MagicMirror’s technology to the US Food and Drug Administration for clearance over some of its health metrics, with an anticipated approval of more standard ones such as certain heart health and breathing metrics this year, NuraLogix CEO Marzio Pozzuoli told CNET.
The MagicMirror works similarly to Anura, an app from NuraLogix that leverages the same type of technology and some artificial intelligence the company has patented under its Affective AI technology, DeepAffex. As the use of AI advances, refining both pattern recognition in medicine and at-home wellness tracking, the idea of a device like the MagicMirror may become less far-fetched.
