A street performance robot. It was an assignment for a high school class to make a robot that will amuse people by just using waste materials. Our team came up with an idea to create a plate-spinning robot that would be fun to watch and surprising. Everyone drew the finished robot, gathered empty cans, cardboard, and other materials, created the belt mechanism to spin the dish, and attached the handle to drive it. The team had a lot of fun making the robot and continued working on it until late every day.
Clunk, clunk. The robot, which was built entirely by hand, was not very reliable at first, but as soon as the handles were carefully turned, the bars on the robot's hand and the plate at the end began to rotate. “We did it!” I and my team members were elated when our idea took shape. The robots were displayed in the classroom with those of other teams and were enjoyed by all the adults and children who came to visit the school.
As a result, through building a robot for the first time in my life, I came to recognize my own interest in making things and the "fun" it involved. I also learned that I could get pleasure from bringing fun to others by showing them what I had made and having them use it. This experience led me to continue to be involved in robotics R&D throughout university and graduate school, and it also sparked my desire to make my own creations that could be genuinely useful to more people and to the world. I decided to join Fujitsu, because I sympathized with the idea of being human-centric and expected to be able to conduct R&D that would benefit people and the world, with a focus on people's enjoyment.
After joining the company, I was involved in R&D in the healthcare field. While enjoying learning about new technological fields such as sensing and data analysis, I participated in projects with overseas research laboratories and customers in Ireland, the Netherlands, and other countries, and took on the challenge of solving issues in a global context. In particular, I was posted to Finland, where AI, IoT, and other cutting-edge technologies are being used in the healthcare field, to work on a project to implement and service Fujitsu's R&D technology (*1) on the Fujitsu healthcare cloud. I was given the opportunity to change my vague expectation of "being useful to people and the world" into a real and tangible feeling.
In response to a request from physiotherapists in the medical field to assess a patient's state of recovery quantitatively this project developed technology to quantify the characteristics of various walking styles using signals from gyroscopic sensors attached to the patients’ ankles. During rehabilitation at hospitals, physiotherapists observe patients' movements to understand their recovery status. However, the number of physiotherapists is small, and a single physiotherapist must see multiple patients. In addition, the skills of the physiotherapists varied widely, and during hospital rehabilitation, they were required quantitatively to monitor patients' walking movements and assist in documenting the recovery process.
The fact that we were able to convert the technology we developed into a service and deliver it to users was largely due to the fact that we were all able to work together on the project with the cooperation of the Fujitsu’s business unit and Fujitsu Research in Japan. At the time, the business unit had a platform for managing personal data, and by incorporating the technology of Fujitsu Research into that platform, we were able to realize the service. Also, it was difficult to get a true evaluation of Fujitsu Research’s technology in practice, so we were fortunate enough to have physiotherapists actually test it. Based on their feedback, we repeatedly made improvements, such as parameter adjustments and supplementation, to complete the technology for calculating gait characteristics with a high degree of accuracy.
During the two years I was posted overseas, I stayed in the UK and Finland, where I was able to gain a variety of experiences unique to the field, including agile technical improvements with local development teams, demonstrations at customer sites, and even medical device certification. In particular, I had the opportunity to get direct inputs from the field; we were able to see up close how physiotherapists were enjoying using the services we had created. Furthermore, when I heard an episode from one of the physiotherapists who said, “I had an actual patient use the service, and he was so happy that he could see his own recovery status as data, it made him cry“. I felt really happy to be doing this job. Although it was a small step, it gave me the feeling that I had created something genuinely useful for people and the world as a whole.
In addition to learning and experiencing things on the job, I gained many insights through my time in Finland. What impressed me the most was their ability to smile. Finland is the happiest country in the world, and there are many reasons for this, such as living close to nature, a well-balanced work life, healthy social welfare, sauna culture, etc. But what I really felt was that even in urban areas, people around me were always smiling and happy to talk to me, even if I was a stranger and foreigner.
On the other hand, after returning to Japan from Finland, I felt that people are less conscious of their surroundings and smile less, with people walking around looking at their smartphones and looking down without paying attention to their surroundings, people getting irritated with each other due to congestion in buses, trains, hospitals, etc., people getting too absorbed in SNS and getting tired. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that people are being ‘used’ by technology and services. It is true that the use of new technologies and services has improved convenience, cost, and efficiency in our daily lives, but on the other hand, I feel that people have become so caught up in the use of such technologies and services that they have lost that all-important connection between people and have fewer smiles on their faces.
I believe that technology and services should essentially improve people's lives and, at the same time, enhance their sense of security and well-being. This is an ordinary thing, but my experience in Finland made me realize it once again, and it strengthened my desire to continue developing technologies that really do put such smiles on people’s faces and make society a happier place.
I am currently involved in the research and development of technology to optimize the flow of medical and health services (care pathways) received by consumers, by connecting individual patients with medical institutions and governments (*2). Our challenge is to establish a care pathway that balances individual effectiveness and experience with overall cost and efficiency, by digitizing the flow of services that patients receive at each stage of disease prevention, treatment, and prognostic care throughout society. We are also working to optimize them by comparing them medical and health data, while also considering what kind of services patients themselves would like to receive. I would like to achieve a world where no one is left behind, where each individual can look ahead and use various services such as medical care and health with a sense of security and well-being.
