Singapore-Japan Fast Track Pitch Event

Health Promotion from the Built Environment

Message from Leadership

Dr. Masahiro Sugata
General Manager
Technology DevisonTakenaka Corporation

A co-creation base "COT-Lab Singapore" was established by Takenaka Corp. in Singapore in April last year. Takenaka will accelerate R&D mainly in the fields of carbon neutrality and digital transformation (DX) through activities at "COT-Lab Singapore" in collaboration with global co-creation partners. In this pitch event, we are looking for partners to co-create a healthy, wellbeing community. We look forward to working with you in the near future.

Takenaka’s Challenge

Challenges As a solution for an aging society with a declining birthrate, healthy communities are being created all over the world. In Japan and other developed countries, the increasing burden of social security costs on the working-age population due to the aging of society is a common social issue, and health is becoming a growing concern not only for individuals and companies, but also for national and local governments.
The WHO defines "physical health," "mental health," and "social health" as three indicators of health, and technological development for human health monitoring using sensing technology has been progressing. While there are many technologies for evaluating physical and mental health through sensing, such as step counts and heart rate variability, there are few technologies for evaluating social health.
Therefore, Takenaka is working on te sensing of human relationship and the communication behaviors in a building and/or a community as an indicator of social health. Futhermore, we would like to evaluate the impact on individual health by the social health implovement, and implement the technology in society. We would make the indicators or the monitoring methods developed by Takenaka will become the de facto standard for well-building design or weli-urban design, and that the widespread use of these indicators and monitoring methods will attract ESG investment and contribute to the enhancement of real estate values in the future.
Collaboration Needs
  1. Systems that can sense relationships among building users, or sensing technologies that can be used for that purpose: We are exploring kinds of following technologies.
    • Technologies to estimate actions based on number of people, population density and moving directions of building users.
    • Technologies to estimate relationships based on the distance and direction between building users.
    • Technologies to estimate emotions based on facial expressions and/or other monitoring items, such as sounds of conversation etc.
  2. We have been attempting to evaluate interactions based on emotions estimated from facial expressions as a research project, but it is difficult to continuously evaluate dynamic objects. In addition, it is difficult to obtain data in a privacy-conscious manner and to output the data.
Opportunity Opportunities to conduct a paid PoC at our office space in Singapore and Japan, as well as PoC with our partner organisation.
Assets/Support
  • Possiblity to provide data acquired at past events using demo tools.
  • Able to utilize the knowledge of experts in various fields within the company to help evaluate the data obtained in the PoC.

About Takenaka

Headquartered in Osaka, Takenaka Corporation is one of the top five general contractors in Japan, providing architecture, engineering and construction services. It has eight domestic offices in Japan and overseas offices in Asia, Europe and the United States. Since 1610, Takenaka has built some of the most iconic buildings in Japan and overseas, including the Tokyo Tower, Tokyo Dome, Changi Airport and others. Leveraging our Group's comprehensive engineering capabilities, we will solve social problems and promote the upgrading and diversification of urban areas to create prosperous and safe communities.