Smart mirrors and hygiene robots – is your bathroom ready?
He predicted the advances in AI and self-driving cars and has an 85% accuracy rate in his predictions. Now futurist Dr. Ian Pearson also predicts major changes in our bathrooms.
How about mirrors with built-in cameras that scan your face and see how healthy and fit you are? Or maybe a personal robot that takes care of your daily hygiene?
Dr. Ian Pearson
Dr. Ian Pearson has long predicted how we will live and interact with technology in the future, from cities and homes to our digital everyday lives. He has also predicted that our most cherished possession – the smartphone you may be reading this on – will become obsolete by the year 2025. According to him, the title “futurologist” is a bit “wacky” and he prefers to call himself an engineer who draws logical conclusions for tomorrow based on today’s trends and developments.
Bathroom Predictions
Many of today’s leading mirror manufacturers have heating fields to reduce condensation, light control, and perhaps a Bluetooth speaker. The bathroom of tomorrow will truly step into our comfort zone!
Smart bathroom mirror as a window to our health
Back in 2015, Panasonic showed off a smart mirror that could project different makeup looks onto the person looking into the mirror. This, combined with ever-improving cameras and facial recognition, means we will soon be able to use our bathroom mirror to check our health, give us styling tips, analyze our breath, and even as a way to communicate with our doctor.
Your personal robot assistant
According to Dr. Pearson, we only need to wait another 15 years before robots are in every bathroom. By 2040, robots will be able to help us with everything from taking care of our homes to taking care of ourselves. They will help us stay clean by bathing, styling our hair, beards, or applying makeup and, perhaps best of all, they will clean our bathrooms!
Criticism of predictions
Dr. Pearson’s prediction about smart mirrors is something that would become a reality by 2025, which is certainly not the case for the average person. But is the technology there? We have cameras and sensors that, together with AI, can see incipient cancer earlier than the majority of well-trained doctors. For example, we have TikTok filters that can make you look like a cat or a monkey – why not program it to change the color of your lipstick? We have smart displays that can show what the mirror camera sees.
Most of the components for smart mirrors already exist, but they are still very rare. Although technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, there is a certain inertia in the market where people do not fully accept anything that intrudes on their comfort zone, of which the bathroom is very much a part. Whether it’s that the technology isn’t quite there yet, that no one dares to invest in manufacturing the smart mirror in Pearson’s vision, or whether there simply isn’t enough demand for that type of product is unclear.
Are we ready to let mirrors analyze our health and robots take over our bathroom routines? Or is the future still a long way off?
2025-02-22 11:05
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