Mobile Health Ushers in a New Era

A good interview with James Nakagawa on Japan Today; Diabetes is one of the fastest growing diseases in Japan, but you don’t have to spend ages in a doctor’s waiting-room anymore to learn how to manage the affliction. Lifewatcher, a revolutionary service from Mobile Healthcare Inc, now provides a daily disease self-management system via your cell phone. He appeared on-camera with WWJ in Aug. 2003 video Here.

In addition, Lifewatcher has collated searches to all of the major fast food groups and many restaurant menus into one personalized mobile dietary database, so that if you want to go out for dinner and you want to be careful and still enjoy what you eat, you simply do a search on your cell phone.

The brainchild of Canadian entrepreneur James Nakagawa and two partners, Lifewatcher is a prescriptive care service under the supervision of doctors and healthcare practitioners. And it is something that is long overdue in Japan where there are now 8.2 million confirmed diabetics and an estimated 8 million more who do not know that they have the disease. This means that 1:4 are diabetic or will develop the disease within their lifetime. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the figure is growing at an alarming rate of 20% a year. Continue >>