After more than three years years in R&D, Tokyo-based Mobile Healthcare Inc. today announced the commercial launch of ‘Lifewatcher,’ a new disease management service that operates over mobile phones and the Internet. According to the company, Lifewatcher is a comprehensive, patient-centric, mobile disease self-management system for diabetes, obesity, and other lifestyle-related disease sufferers. It is critical for diabetes sufferers to track key health indicators such as blood sugar, blood pressure, calorie intake, exercise and their weight. WWJ posted a video interview with company president James Nakagawa on the then-under-development service in 2003.

Lifewatcher aims to be an easy-to-use intelligent tool that allows patients and practitioners to input and instantly view data; Lifewatcher can bring the benefits of self-health to both patients and doctors, for example, by allowing patients to take photos of their meals via mobile phone and then send photos to their Lifewatcher account, which then automatically calculates and collates the nutritional data from a database.

The company says doctors, nurses, parents or care givers can login and remotely monitor patient food calendars as well as view a patient’s daily health record and set medicine alerts.

In one possible application, a care provider or family member working in Tokyo could remotely check to see what a patient or elderly parent living in Gifu City ate for lunch or if the parent remembered to take his or her daily blood pressure medicine. “Lifewatcher will both enhance a patient’s quality of life, greatly increase the level of patient-doctor communication and bring comfort to the family,” says Nakagawa.

Related posts:

1. Mobile Healthcare Inc. Launches ‘Lifewatcher’
2. Mobile Health Ushers in a New Era
3. LifeWatcher Targets Emerging Markets
4. Healthcare Goes Mobile in Japan
5. Interview with CEO of Mobile Healthcare

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