Advanced technology allows individually customized services

By Kang Ye-won

Convergence of industries and user-interface technologies has been trendy for years and will continue to play a key role across business sectors in 2012. As these become more complex and advanced, they bring user-friendly and individually-customized products and services for consumers.

Competition among Web giants over platforms is likely to heighten in the coming years as already seen among Apple, Google and Facebook. As industries adopt voice assistant technology, communicating with machines will soon become part of our daily lives.
The so-called, healthcare 3.0 will provide individually-customized assistance by adopting advanced technologies into medical equipment and services.

Platform competition to intensify

In the technology business, platform refers to both hardware and software with which developers can create products and services for end users. For example, Microsoft created its own operating system package and allowed other developers to use its platform for further applications to build on it.

As mobile and tablet markets are flourishing rapidly, the competition over platforms will become ever more intense, according to Kwon Ki-young and five other research fellows at KT Business and Economics Research Center, in their recently released book, “After Smart.”

For instance, Apple’s iPhone release was a game changer in mobile markets since it took control of a platform where third party applications were churned out, Kwon said.

“It’s a win-win business for Apple and app developers,” said Kim Kyeong-jun, a managing partner at Deloitte Consulting. In other words, the company’s success lies in its double-edged sword policies which opened its platforms to third parties but limited them to Apple users. “This type of ‘coupling business’ model will become widespread in the industry,” Kim said.

Up against Apple’s market dominance, Google’s Android chose the opposite direction by opening its platform to all wireless companies and device manufacturers. But the downside of this business model was that it lacked compatibility among different devices and software programs, which put the burden on consumers and app developers.



Industries to accept voice technology

As face-to-face communications among people decline, voice control systems, which allow people to talk with machines, have gained momentum. For its latest iPhone 4S, Apple introduced a voice assistant, called Siri. Even though it’s still in a beta mode, the potential for technology advancement boosted demand for industry leaders such as Nuance Communications, which currently has nearly 69 percent of the global market, said Lee Sung-ho, a research fellow at Samsung Economics Research Institute (SERI), in a memo. Experts predicted the market to grow at 22 percent annually, reaching $5.4 billion in 2013, Lee said.

And the technology can be applied to a variety of businesses from automobiles to games. For example, almost 47 percent of globally sold vehicles will have GPS systems that recognize voice commands by 2015, according to Lee’s note. Microsoft’s latest Xbox Kinect already has the ability to sense voices and motion.

Convergence of tech and healthcare 3.0

As one of the front-running countries, and with a low birth rate, South Korea is rapidly aging as the older population is growing faster. By 2050, the percentage of people over the age of 65 will account for more than 42 percent of the total population, according to the Korea Institute for Social and Health Affairs.

Embracing new technologies, healthcare 3.0 has shifted its focus to improving healthy life expectancy by offering customized services for patients, said Choi Jin-young, another SERI research fellow. Healthy life expectancy refers to the number of years a person can live in good health, and the Korean average is currently 71.

Thanks to the success of genome projects, personalized treatment and medicines have rapidly improved in the past 10 years and are still considered an ever-growing field. Technologies that physicians can soon put into practice include needle-free vaccination and virtual endoscopy techniques, which will be widely adopted in the next two or three years, Choi said.

Currently, about 500 customized medicines are in development globally for cancer, Alzheimer’s and arthritis. The trend is to move away from investing in a “blockbuster” drug and focus on niche drugs that target sub-patient groups, he added.
In the medical equipment industry, digital systems have gained traction which takes care of everything from detecting abnormalities at the microscopic level to diagnosis and treatment.

Efforts to embrace social network tools are also increasing to elevate the quality of patients’ life and treatment. A blog named “Patients Like Me,” which is a start-up business, is a community for rare-disease patients worldwide where they connect with one another. Major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Novartis have also participated as part of their research and for running drug trials.