Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday announced it is to collaborate with Uni-President Group (統一集團) to collect health data at 100 convenience stores and drugstores across the nation, as the world’s largest contract electronics maker pushes further into the healthcare sector.
“I urge the public to use Hon Hai’s ‘H2U Health ATM’ (H2U健康ATM) at 7-Eleven stores every day to build your personal healthcare data. I believe collecting the data will be meaningful in helping develop preventive medicine,” Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) told a news conference in Taipei.
The collaboration is being carried out via Hon Hai’s YongLin Healthcare Foundation and Uni-President’s Taiwan Millennium Health Foundation.
The project offers free measurements — such as blood pressure, body temperature, weight and heart rate — through Hon Hai’s “smart” all-in-one checkup facility installed in designated 7-Eleven and Cosmed (康是美) stores.
Hon Hai has developed a mobile app for users to check their data after completing the two-minute examination, while its subsidiary, Asia Pacific Telecom Co (APT, 亞太電信), is in charge of cloud-computing and data storage, a joint statement from the two foundations said.
The two firms complement each other, as Hon Hai provides healthcare solutions technology and Uni-President has more than 5,000 convenience stores in Taiwan, Uni-President chairman Alex Lo (羅智先) said.
The project would begin in 100 locations and would gradually expand to more of the company’s convenience stores and drugstores, Lo said.
“It is expected to significantly increase the public’s awareness of the importance of preventive medicine, which I think will lessen the National Health Insurance Administration’s expenses on chronic diseases in the long term,” Lo said.
Hon Hai’s employees in China and the US have been conducting physical examinations on an annual basis and voluntarily provide the data to Hon Hai for further analysis, Gou said.
Collecting the data outside of the company via the collaboration would accelerate Hon Hai’s development of healthcare solutions and precision medicine, Gou said.
Hon Hai expects to collect 10 million data sets from the project in the first half of this year, said YongLin Healthcare Foundation vice chairman Leonard Wu (吳良襄), who doubles as head of Hon Hai’s healthcare subgroup.
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