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Thoughts on the Medical Mirror

An analysis of the Medical Mirror's usability reveals a major challenge. Is a flaw in the system preventing the Medical Mirror from reaching its full potential?

The Medical Mirror is a web cam, mirror, and computer system working together to provide immediate vital sign feedback to the individual looking into it. Ming-Zher Pooh an electrical and medical-engineering graduate student at MIT developed a technology that monitors pulse, respiration, and blood pressure through a web cam, computer and mirror (Mone, 2011). The web cam receives input in the form of reflected light waves, translates the information, and outputs a readable rate measurement on the mirror’s surface. Consider the immediate benefits for the health conscious individual in the way of heart rate, and blood pressure monitoring prior to a workout routine. Additionally, it can prove valuable in hospices, nursing homes, and hospitals. Uses can be extended to include infants, the elderly, or infirm where attaching monitoring devices may be problematic. A prime example would be the ability to measure vital signs of burn victims where attaching a measuring device could prove painful. For the average individual, using a medical device embedded in a household item would be less complicated then attempting to use a blood pressure gauge. As such, it can be seamlessly integrated into the home. Embedded systems have been making their way into the home for years in the way of microwaves, big screen TVs, thermostats. My initial concern is that the hardware would have to be cost effective, and the software very extensible. Would the web cam have to be calibrated periodically? Would the software need periodic updates and patches? Would the Medical Mirror be better if it used an embedded approach for the hardware thus removing major maintenance issues form the user?

In the area of Bioinformatics the potential to stream back to medical data repositories or health-care facilities is the where the Medical Mirror stands out. Consider an individual undergoing treatment for a condition. In addition to the individual returning to the office for follow-up visits, the patient's vital signs can be streamed back and collected by the attending doctor allowing the treatment to be studied on a more granular level over time. Observing the effects of a prescribed drug over time can now potentially be accomplished. Statistical data can be collected by drug companies to improve their products. Individuals with illness’ can have their vital signs tracked in real time, collected and analyzed.

However, the area of medical records data collection is not standardized. There are hundreds of different health-care institutions in the U.S. that use different systems to record and store data, and many doctors do not use electronic records at all, making the task of retrieving and updating data extremely difficult for the average person (Kohane, 2011). Consider the recent demise of Google Health. Its untimely death is, in many ways, an extension of U.S. health-care providers' failure to share data across institutions, or make it easy for patients to obtain it (Talbot, 2011). The area of Bioinformatics needs to be standardized. It would be in the best interest of the patients, and the health-care industry to do so. The future could then be wide open for developers to create additional embedded systems to help improve the quality of life.
Despite the concerns raised, there certainly is a place for the Medical Mirror. The potential is even greater if the Bioinformatics community could agree on a standard. For use in the home, hospitals, and even gyms to track heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure in an unobtrusive way is in my opinion a giant step in the integration of embedded systems in the home.




The structure? A household item, a mirror.
The creativity? Improving the quality of life via an unobtrusive device with an embedded system.

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