The Reflection Mirror

An interactive, non-intrusive mirror that promotes more than just visual self-reflection

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Inspiration

Maintaining proper mental health is an essential aspect of life. For decades, both bright light therapy and journaling have proven to be some of the most effective techniques to manage one’s feelings and emotions. We want to create a solution to make journaling as straightforward and engaging as possible by combining the procedures from bright light therapy.

What it does

The Reflection Mirror utilizes proximity sensors to flash LEDs in a breathing configuration when the user walks past the product and keeps a constant light when the user is directly in front of the product to encourage users to journal.

How we built it

We employed SolidWorks and Onshape while tackling this design challenge, adopting a master modelling approach with a focus on design for manufacturing and assembly principles. To draw inspiration, we researched existing beauty mirror designs and made necessary modifications to craft an innovative solution tailored to our specific constraints. Harnessing the power of a 3D printer, we minimized the number of components and connections, ultimately achieving a design that eliminates the need for any fasteners.

The electronic components of The Reflection Mirror consist of an Arduino Nano, an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, and a set of RGB LEDs. The components were assembled on a breadboard and coded with Arduino IDE.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout our design process, we encountered a challenge in manufacturing the complete design as initially envisioned by our team. In particular, we wanted to add speech recognition to our design, however, we could not program the Raspberry Pi which held back this venture. The 3D printing process proved to be more time-consuming than our initial estimates, prompting our team to revise the design to streamline the overall manufacturing process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As it was the first hackathon for all of us, we are extremely proud to say that we completed a project. We recognized that our strengths don't necessarily lie in computer science, and are proud to have created something that highlights the individual members of our group. We are also glad to see the knowledge learned in college being applied in this focused environment.

What we learned

We learned that if things don't go quite according to plan, to not give up and adapt to the situation. We were initially very ambitious about our design, but despite the setbacks, we kept going with a redesigned version that proved to be effective.

What's next for The Reflection Mirror

There is a lot of potential with this project. In the future, the main component we want to implement is speech-to-text recognition, which allows the user to record their submissions and see them on a website/document. This version of the design would be our complete original plan. Incorporating a smart mirror display screen, journal database, and personalized summaries each week are some ideas we could consider adding to the project as well.

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