– Designed to enable employers to provide effective health promotion programs
– Leverages groundbreaking connected scale technology that was pioneered by Tanita
TOKYO, Aug. 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Tanita Corporation, a comprehensive health solutions company, announced that it is launching its award-winning Tanita Health Program across the US from August 29. Already deployed in Japan, the Tanita Health Program is an integrated suite of hardware and software that helps employers improve the health of their employees. For employers, the program offers a proven track record in reducing employee healthcare expenditures. For employees, it offers an easy and engaging way to visualize their progress.
Image of Tanita Health Program’s smartphone application screen
Using the latest model of Tanita’s body composition scale, along with wearable activity trackers equipped with communications functionality, blood pressure measurement devices, and the internet, this program offers everything organizations need to establish an effective and comprehensive group health promotion program. The program is already being deployed by such organizations as local governments, companies, and health insurance associations, primarily in Japan.
Available throughout the US, the program is designed to raise the motivation of participants to improve their health and enjoy tracking their progress. Program participants carry an activity monitor that counts steps and measures calories burned, measuring a wide variety of data. This data is stored in the cloud, along with data measured with Tanita devices, such as its body composition scales and blood pressure measurement devices. Using this data, participants not only gain visibility into changes in their bodies and their activity levels, they can also graph trends using their PCs or smartphones. In addition, users can change the faceplate design of the activity monitors to an original design, and the program offers features such as a step count ranking, so that participants can virtually compete through their step counts each month, and a point program that awards points to participants based on factors such as their step counts, which can then be exchanged for gifts or other incentives.
The program has attracted attention for its effectiveness in reducing healthcare costs, including being mentioned in a white paper from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and has also received an award for excellence from the ministry in its Smart Life Project Awards.
In 1992, Tanita developed the world’s first body scale that measures both body weight and composition. Thereafter, Tanita released various other tools to measure things like basal metabolic rate, total weight and lean body mass. Additionally, in 2003, Tanita released its first connected scale, called the “NT-101,” positioning the company as a global pioneer. Subsequently, Tanita went on to also launch its support network called “Health Planet” that connects the NT-101 with sphygmomanometers and pedometers. These, in turn, forward health data to personal computers for easy analysis. The health management services that utilize the connected scale have since been upgraded into the “Tanita Health Program.”
Tanita had already developed Tanita Body Composition Element, a smartphone application that converts body composition information into 3D elements, based on visualizations of atoms, presenting them in an impactful way. This app was exhibited in 2017 and 2018 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world’s largest consumer electronics exhibition, held in Las Vegas. The launch of the Tanita Health Program is an extension of these efforts in the US, with Tanita embarking on a full-scale expansion in the US due to the significant response to its body composition measurement technology at CES. This program is a service offered through Tanita’s US subsidiary, Tanita Corporation of America, Inc.
About Tanita
Tanita is a Japanese health measurement device manufacturer established in 1944. As a pioneer in body composition measurement, Tanita has been a leader in the worldwide health measurement device market since developing and launching the world’s first body fat scale that could measure body fat just by stepping on it in 1992, followed by achievements such as launching the world’s first body fat scale with the ability to measure visceral fat in 2001, and launching the world’s first body composition scale that could measure body fat by location in 2004. In addition, Tanita’s highly accurate body composition measurement technology has become a standard in the healthcare and research fields. Since 1991, over 200 papers using Tanita’s body fat and body composition scales have been presented at various academic conferences. These various research results are even now being fed back into product development, and Tanita has collected over 14,000 points of biometric data, which forms the foundation of Tanita’s analysis algorithm, with the goal of further improving accuracy. At the same time, Tanita led the world in launching activity monitors, which are currently becoming common as wearable devices, aimed at the general public in 2009. With Tanita’s unique analysis algorithm, the company’s devices produce highly accurate measurements of energy consumption, with a correlation coefficient of 0.907 with the results produced by human calorimeters, the gold standard in energy consumption measurement.
