Nikkei Electronics Asia --July 2010
Cover Story
A Doctor in Your Pocket: Alerting You to Changes in Your Body You Never Noticed Before

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Jul 1, 2010 00:10 Takuya Otani, Junichi Oshita

Service providers are flocking to the healthcare field, where electronics technology is being utilized extensively. Until lately electronics companies have only bee proposing new constituent technologies, but at last the service providers are expecting to see profits.

(Photo: Junichi Yamai, Illustrations: Reiko Kusumoto)

"Finally, successful examples!" says Nobuyuki Arakawa at survey firm Seed Planning, Inc. of Japan, referring toĦĦLuna-Luna from MTI Ltd. of Japan and au Smart Sports from KDDI Corp. of Japan (Fig.1). Both are fee-based healthcare services for mobile telephones, costing a few hundred yen a month, and have caused quite a stir in the industry by signing up over 1.5 million usersNote 1).

Note 1) Luna-Luna is only available to paid subscribers, but au Smart Sports offers a function subset free of charge as well.
Fig.1 Healthcare Services Gaining Momentum
The mobile phone-based healthcare service market is developing rapidly, and the domestic market is expected to hit 160 billion yen in 2012. Market scale graph by Nikkei Electronics based on material courtesy Seed Planning.

Marubeni Information Systems Co., Ltd. of Japan, a subsidiary of giant trading firm Marubeni Corp. of Japan, recently launched a healthcare business utilizing miniature sensors to simultaneously monitor user electrocardiographic (ECG) signals, skin temperature and other indicators (Fig.2). In January 2010 the company signed a sales agency agreement with sensor developer WIN Human Recorder Co., Ltd. of Japan, and hopes to achieve five billion yen annually in sales within three years.

Fig.2 Marubeni Enters the Game
In January 2010 Marubeni Information Systems announced it would be offering healthcare services utilizing sensors for ECG, skin temperature, etc.