Along with my co-founder, I’m developing a smart mirror with health sensors and various quantified self integrations. Below is a link to a short survey that explains more of what we have in mind. If you have 5 minutes, I’d love your opinion to help shape what we do.
Two second bio blurb:
Me: Director of Product at idealab.com. MBA from U of Chicago
My cofounder: mechanical engineering from MIT (undergraduate & graduate degrees)
I’d like to have a smart mirror that can answer the following question:
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most quantified of them all?”
A mirror with an integrated camera could also record heart rate, pupil dilation, and perhaps time spent looking at the mirror…
Haven’t answered yet (in a sec) but please, can you also display calendar and todo lists information.
Lets say, if developer X was working on a service, how could they integrate with your mirror?
Great project
Thanks Diogo. Yeah, we could in show calendar, todo items, weather, traffic, personal goals. We have considered how we could allow 3rd parties to develop on top of it. We’d certainly like to display any data someone wished to view every day. So special integrations with tracking services could be a possibility. Also, we’ve considered maybe other people could come up with clever uses of the technology/sensors we build into it. Long answer to say is yes, we’ve thought about it, it’s definitely something we would wish to pursue.
Awesome. We might even be able to tell you who the fairest in the land in is with enough people installing this product. 
But yes, those are good use cases. Especially the vanity meter. 
I think this could sit very well within the health market using visual analysis. As Eric and the questionnaire suggests, heart rate, pupil dilation, changes in skin colour, etc seem the most logical (although logical does not always = best approach).
I’m sure the highly profitable beauty market could be attractive to look at too. Makeup guidance perhaps?
Also, as a side observation - will a vanity metric negatively impact the use of the product? Would customers stop using the mirror to avoid being branded vain?
Great feedback. Thanks for taking the time to look at it. Yeah, we wouldn’t really do a vanity metric. I just thought it was funny. I assumed it was an in-joke/startup humor because vanity metric is a term commonly used in the startup world. http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/vanity-metrics/
I’ve read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries too many times that the term vanity metric immediately creates a negative, knee-jerk reaction
Then again, what better place to display “vanity” metrics than on a mirror?
Survey done. I hope it helps and I hope you can make this device! Fingers crossed!
We are working on a similar idea from a research perspective focusing on data integration and data visualization. Our “QS Mirror”(http://specch.io/) is actually not a real mirror but a dynamic human shape renderer that shows in an integrated manner different QS feed (i.e. sleep, location, mood, … whatever) generated by sensors the user wear/own.
Answering the survey is hard as I don’t have a good idea of what a mirror does to “Message physician: Notify of current status and health hazards” or how it will track fatigue.
When creating your product your focus should be on creating something that’s a good solution for some problem. Don’t try to solve everything but play nice with other devices for other functions.