Listening to the Customer

Worldwide Business Development and Internet-Based Solutions

Our strength lies in providing general consumers with easy-to-use applications of professional medical equipment technology. Take the blood pressure monitor, for instance. In the past, you could only have your blood pressure checked at the hospital. Now, however, you can check it by yourself at home every day. When we released a blood pressure monitor to the consumer market some 30 years ago, it suffered from very low sales because people did not imagine they could check their own blood pressure. Sales of our blood pressure monitors began to grow only when people started to realize it was important to check and record their blood pressure at home every day. Today, we have more than a half of the global market. In the future, demand will increase, for example, in China and India, and countries in Latin America and North Africa, whose economies are expected to grow and prosper. We aim to increase sales in these markets to develop our business in broader regions around the world.
By contrast, in a country like Japan, where the market for healthcare equipment has almost reached saturation, we aim to develop services that use information networks to continuously gather and store biometric information. The “WellnessLink” system, which we launched for Japanese customers in November 2010, is a service package developed to achieve this goal. Every day, it collects customer biometric data such as blood pressure, body weight, and pedometer readings, sends the information to the customer's account on a special website, and provides advice on healthcare and diet. For example, the “Daily Blood Pressure Notebook” service allows customers to not only print out a graph showing morning/evening blood pressure values measured at home. At the same time, you can enter your body weight and pedometer values and the medicines you are taking currently. The customer can print out their personal webpage to help their doctor with treatment and advice. The “Daily Diet Program” can graphically represent body weight values measured every morning and evening. Being able to visualize changes in body weight helps the customer to diet without rebounding. As a matter of fact, people lose weight during the night and gain weight by eating during the day. Seeing the overall trend helps the customer to better regulate food intake to prevent weight gain. Instead of simply showing measurements, this program processes them to make them easier to use, and we believe such solutions will become even more important in the future.

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