Smiley: Designing Smile Recognition Smart Mirror for Premenstrual Syndrome

Smiling is the most common way in which people express positive emotions and happiness. This study proposes Smiley, a smile-recognition smart mirror that can only be seen when users smile at it. To verify if there were emotional changes through smiling, the smile-recognition smart mirror was designed and manufactured for women of childbearing age in their 20s and 30s suffering from premenstrual syndrome (PMS), and a user evaluation was conducted. We recruited four experimental participants and had them use the mirror in their own home for 10 days according to their menstrual cycle, maintain a self-diary, and record smile photos to observe changes in their facial expressions over 10 days. We then carried out in-depth interviews with the users through memory-recall using their smile photo record data and self-diary data organized by date and time, and then qualitatively analyzed the results. Women suffering from PMS continuously experience anger or feel sensitive and depressed. Using Smiley, these negative emotions caused by PMS can be changed to positive feelings and emotional stability by smiling. Moreover, Smiley provides personalized information about the user’s menstrual cycle in color, allowing her to identify and prepare for her cycle and gain psychological stability. The evaluation results demonstrated that smiling evoked positive emotions and positively influenced PMS and users’ daily life. This study is significant in that the positive effects of smiling are not only discussed merely for the sake of the psychological experiment, but have also been used to develop a new technology that can provide users with a wide variety of experiences.