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September 30, 2014

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Remote sensing technology at center stage

AMERICAN Branding Mitchell, who married a Shanghai woman, tried for a long time to persuade his mother-in-law to go to the hospital for a physical examination. But she never went because public hospitals in China are always overcrowded and the doctors don’t give each patient much time.

When Mitchell as a buyer showed up at ChinaSourcing Summit 2014 held last week in Hangzhou, he found a wearable device at the event’s expo. It is a belt capable of recording a wearer’s heart rate, blood pressure and blood oxygen level and can be connected to a smartphone, which collects the wearer’s data and uploads it to the Cloud.

The information can be read on any phone the wearer designates — such as their children’s phone. A computer can analyze the data and warn of any potential problems or disease risks.

That means Mitchell’s mother-in-law does not need to leave her house to get examined. “I think she will have no excuse to deny that,” said Mitchell.

Wearable devices are one highlight of the sourcing summit, which discussed how to spread smart technologies to “small people” yet generate “big data” to make profits and develop the industry.

The expo also displayed a physical examination machine that tests users’ height, weight, body fat ratio, blood pressure, blood oxygen, and blood sugar in one minute. It is especially designed for community clinics so old residents can get a simple examination near their home.

After scanning a user’s ID card, the machine automatically shows the user’s physical index accumulated at different times from the Cloud. The analysis allows community doctors to quickly see those with potential problems and treat them. “Hospital resources are unbalanced in China. Many people visit doctors in large hospitals because they have better facilities and better doctors. Therefore strengthening the role of community clinics is a trend,” said Li Zhenhong, deputy general manager of Contec Medical System Co, which produces the physical examination machine.

Smart technologies can not only solve the problem of overcrowding at big hospitals, but also help with small business management, bringing individual enterprises to the global e-commerce business, said experts at the summit.

With the presence of large outsourcing and analyzing companies like Gartner, Infosays, Huawei and Pactera, the annual convention lures around 500 exhibitors, including 180 speakers.

Fu Haipeng, a general manager in the finance department at Pactera, gave an example during his presentation about “smart use of big data.” He cited a user looking for a restaurant. A smartphone app developed by a bank could recommend a restaurant that “fits to his or her assets,” such as an expensive restaurant for a rich man or a moderate eatery to someone of lesser means, based on his bank account.

Du Chuanwen, director of Internet Finance Club 1000, took it to a more granular level, saying, “The big data of Alipay can really subvert the traditional way of finance.”

Alipay, owned by Alibaba, is a service much like PayPal, which is used by users of alibaba.com and taobao.com. Du said the data banks can be too vague, recording only how much money a customer spends and where he/she spends it, but Alipay records exactly what items a customer buys — “very useful data.”

“The platform collects big data, and turns big data into profits. That is how big data works,” he said.

A theme sounded throughout the expo was that digital markets know no boundaries. IT, medicine and finance were three well-document examples, but experts cited many other examples. There are baby diapers with sensors that send a message to parents’ phones once they get wet; diapers that analyze urine to adjust the baby’s physical condition; and advertisement in subway stations with QR codes that customers can scan to make a purchase in just seconds.

Owen Chen, research director at Gartner, said, “We are in a new and disruptive world of people, business and things ... By 2020, there will be 30 billion things on the Internet of things, and people will have 7.3 billion smart devices.”

Chen brings up a future home that “may have 500 devices, fixed on curtains, lights, air conditioners, cars, microwave oven, and many other pieces of equipment, while one phone can control them all from a remote distance.”

When the convention was first held in Hangzhou four years ago, heads of outsourcing enterprises were just talking about the overall picture rather than detailed plans. The event is sponsored by the country’s Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as well as the Zhejiang provincial government.

Hangzhou asserts that it is “the most valuable outsourcing city in China,” having received outsourcing contracts of over US$5.7 billion last year, including offshore sourcing worth over US$4.4 billion.

There are currently almost 300,000 employees working at more than 1,100 outsourcing enterprises in the city.




 

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