According to medical semeiotics, human face is a precious revealer of key information about the healthy or
unhealthy status of individuals, as a combination of physical signs and expressive features. The central idea
in SEMEOTICONS is to exploit the face as a major indicator of individual’s well-being for the prevention of
cardio-metabolic risk and cardiovascular diseases (CVD), for which healthcare systems are registering an
exponential growth of social costs.
In accordance to a semeiotics viewpoint, face signs will be mapped to measures and computational descriptors,
automatically assessed. To this end, SEMEOTICONS will design and construct an innovative multisensory
system integrated into a hardware platform having the exterior aspect of a mirror: the so-called “Wize Mirror”.
This will easily fit into users’ home or other sites of their daily life (e.g. fitness and nutritional centres, pharmacies,
schools and so on).
The Wize Mirror will collect data mainly in the form of videos, images and gas concentration signals. These
will be processed by advanced dedicated methods to extract biometric, morphometric, colorimetric, and
compositional descriptors measuring individual’s facial signs. The integration of such descriptors will provide a
Virtual Individual’s Model, which will be used to compute and trace the daily evolution of an individual’s “wellness
index”.
A well-being diary based on this index will enable users to evaluate and personally correlate the lifestyle to their
wellness and health status. Suggestions and coaching messages will be also provided to foster the maintenance
of a correct lifestyle or reduce noxious habits. Moreover, users will be enabled to share data in their diary
with health professionals so as to receive, when needed, direct expert guidance and support. In this frame,
SEMEOTICONS will carefully focus on the development of user-friendly human-computer interactions so as to
foster the perception of the system usefulness and reliability.
Medical experts will validate the system with respect to the reproducibility of measurements, the efficacy in
detecting changes in well-being and cardio-metabolic status and the acceptability by the end-users.
The exploitation of the Wize Mirror will promote new aggregations between health and well-being actors
including industry, fitness, and schools. Furthermore, significant effects towards the development of new CVD
prevention strategies are expected, with positive impacts on the reduction of avoidable disease burden and
health expenditures.