Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the most mindful of them all?
That’s a question healthtech company Baracoda hopes you’ll pose. At CES 2024 the company unveiled BMind, a smart mirror for mental wellness and managing stress.
Baracoda’s smart mirror launched last year with a skincare analysis feature that tells you what products to use and how to take care of your skin. Now it’s adding the checkin, the mindfulness routines as well as, you guessed it, an AI voice assistant. Because it’s 2024, and apparently no product is allowed to get to market without an AI assistant.
You interact with the mirror via voice as well as hand gestures, so you don’t smudge up the glass. A fist pump or “knock” gesture brought you back to the main menu; thumbs up to select.
As for the wellness checkin, the mirror begins by asking how you’re feeling. I replied I was a little tired but excited to be here at CES.
In response it gave me a gratitude meditation, in which I was asked to close my eyes and think of a moment today that made me happy — like an interaction with a loved one. Then it told me to take deep breaths.
That’s an example of BMind’s guided meditation based on your mood that includes affirmations and breathwork. The idea is to integrate a mindfulness practice into your mirror routine, whether or not you’re also using that time for skincare.
The Barracoda BMind wants you glowing inside and out, with meditation and skincare routines.
Credit: Cecily Mauran / Mashable
As with other AI assistants, you can ask the mirror just about anything, such as the weather. Unlike with many AI voice assistants, the Baracoda’s proprietary operating system, CareOS, takes privacy very seriously — because so much of our mirror time is, well, private.
“It’s placed in your bathroom, so we are being extremely careful with sharing data,” says Huong Le Dieu, lead product manager. “We only connect to the web if the user asks for it.”
The generative AI model that powers the assistant lives locally on the device; and yes, you can only connect to the web by opening the accompanying app and opting in.
Unfortunately, you can’t buy the smart mirror directly through Baracoda. As a B2B business, it partners directly with mirror manufacturers — but that could also meen you’ll see its technology cropping up in mirrors from smart home brands sometime soon.
Until then, we’ll just have to settle for plain old non-talking mirrors.