Japan's Home Exercise Equipment Network

A consortium of leading Japanese companies plans to establish protocols allowing health monitors and electronic exercise equipment used in the home to network with each other. The data gathered can than be collated and processed, allowing individuals to track their health and their fitness programmes.

A Japanese-language press release from five companies - Mitsubishi Electric Engineering, Citizen, Sharp, Tanita and Hitachi -  explains the plan. Information will be gathered from such equipment as treadmills, heart rate monitors, blood pressure monitors, body fat monitors, electronic scales, exercise bicycles and treadmills. 

According to an English-language summary:

So far, the ‘Development of High-performance Health Evaluation Equipment for Home Healthcare’ system has successfully passed field trials in which machines used Bluetooth links to correlate information about users’ blood pressure, heart rate, body composition and more to give a comprehensive picture of their health and progress in training.

The next step is to prime the healthcare hardware market for the arrival of the new information-gathering facilities, which is likely to start next year. The Japanese national health service is due to be revised next spring to cope with both an aging population and new ways to manage healthcare.
 

May 3rd, 2007