- Message from the President
- Outline of the NTT Group and the role of the holding company/Overview of reporting organization
- Basic approach to CSR
- Management organization
- Featured activities from fiscal 2007
- Communication between people and their communities
- Moving Toward Ubiquitous Broadband Communications
- Initiatives for a Shrinking and Aging Society
- Providing Increased Opportunities to Participate in the Community
- Communication between people and the global environment
- Safe and secure communication
- Team NTT communication
- In partnership with our customers, shareholders, investors, and other stakeholders
- Third party opinion
- Editorial notes
- GRI index
- Questionnaire
- CSR Report PDF download
- Back issues
|
Initiatives for a Shrinking and Aging Society
- Developing solutions for monitoring and providing healthcare to the elderly
- Developing solutions for providing remote medical examinations and healthcare services
- Providing support for education utilizing ICT
Developing support structures for enabling the elderly to live free of anxiety
As its population continues to shrink and age, Japan needs to address a range of pressing social issues, including safety and security in daily life, environmental and energy issues, and revitalization of the economy. However, perhaps the most crucial issue is coping with the increasingly aged population. With the shift toward nuclear families, more and more elderly live either on their own or together with other elderly people. The NTT Group is endeavoring to develop ICT-based support structures that will help to relieve anxiety and loneliness among these elderly people.One solution is monitoring services that alert family or local authorities and such like to changes in the well-being of elderly who live on their own or with other elderly people. Such monitoring services use ICT to transmit data from a sensing system without putting any burden or stress on the individual being monitored.
Another area is the provision of emotional support by helping to relieve the loneliness of those who live on their own or link them with other family members. One such solution is a communication service in which volunteers and professional caregivers use ICT to connect with and listen to the cares and concerns of elderly people living on their own.
Yet another solution provides preventive health care support to help maintain the health of elderly people who do not require care directly. ICT is used to connect elderly in their homes with a professional caregiver or rehabilitation center. This system enables participating members to communicate among themselves and to receive instruction on exercises that help to maintain sense of balance and avoid injurious slips and falls.
During fiscal 2007, NTT laboratory groups pressed ahead with R&D in these areas, and NTT Group companies carried out field tests of various solutions. One of our achievements in this field is the adoption in fiscal 2006 of our elderly monitoring system by the city of Kobe, where many elderly people left homeless by the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake are still living alone in temporary housing. In fiscal 2007 this system was used to augment existing manpower-based and other services for monitoring elderly people.
From April 18 to May 31, 2006, in cooperation with BestLife Inc. and two other companies, the NTT Group field tested a remote listening service for providing company to elderly people living on their own. For the trial, this remote listening service was used to connect elderly residents of nursing homes to volunteers communicating from their homes via broadband videophone. This system is expected to enable volunteers to provide company to a greater number of elderly people over a larger area. NTT's FLET'S Phone videophone enables volunteers to view not just the faces of the elderly people they chat with, but also their favorite photos, videos, and other content, stimulating closer, more personal conversation. During the trial, the response of recipients was evaluated by a physiotherapist for both verbal responses and facial expressions, and volunteers provided their impressions through a questionnaire survey on the system and its ease of operation. This data will be used to verify the benefits and feasibility of such remote listening systems from a business standpoint. How the ICT-based remote listening service works |
Providing remote medical services
The NTT Group is constantly seeking to utilize ICT to support the provision of reliable healthcare services irrespective of location. To such ends, we are developing information and communications systems to provide remote healthcare services via NGN that connect patients in their homes with doctors in medical facilities to conduct health checkups or video-based medical examinations. We are also working to develop an information and communications platform for supporting remote diagnosis and efficient collaboration between medical facilities via network connections linking general hospitals with local clinics, thereby making advanced medical expertise available to patients in areas with a shortage of medical facilities.
NTT Service Integration Laboratories conducted field tests on these systems during fiscal 2007 as part of NTT initiatives to promote their deployment and use by local authorities, university hospitals and other medical facilities throughout Japan.
NTT Service Integration Laboratories conducted field tests on these systems during fiscal 2007 as part of NTT initiatives to promote their deployment and use by local authorities, university hospitals and other medical facilities throughout Japan.
In an example of successful partnership between private industry and academia in the healthcare field, NTT DoCoMo Hokuriku conducted joint research with Eizo Nanao Corporation and the Kanazawa University Graduate School of Medical Science to develop a new, easy-to-operate system for transmitting graphic and video images taken with X-ray, CT, and MRI devices to the mobile videophones of specialists at other medical facilities. Neurosurgeons at Kanazawa University participating in this research reported that they were able to arrive at initial diagnoses for about half of all cases by following instructions provided by specialists who examined images sent to their mobile phones. They described the system as being extremely effective and more than sufficient for making initial diagnoses and deciding initial treatment in the field of neurosurgery, and as a result, it went into full operation in November 2006.
|
Support for education in underpopulated areas
Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology(MEXT)is promoting the development of a wide variety of support programs intended to meet the needs of contemporary education in areas suffering from depopulation and declining birthrates. The NTT Group has responded by creating a platform design to overcome disadvantages faced by students and teachers in such areas by using teleconferencing, video-equipped mobile terminals, and other ICT to enable distance learning and social interaction with other schools. During field testing in fiscal 2007, NTT Group companies cooperated with local authorities in introducing these programs as well as providing Internet access for elementary school classes in a number of municipalities.On January 25, 2007, an experiment using a new system for video-based joint classes via mobile network was conducted between elementary schools in Kyushu under the auspices of a MEXT program to develop new education systems. A number of NTT Group companies took part in the experiment, which was run by NTT LEARNING SYSTEMS. The use of mobile networks enables teleconferencing even in areas without fixed-line broadband access. System for holding joint classes 
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
