Panasonic Well Venturing into the Future of Family Wellness

The first project that Yoky initiated at Panasonic was Yohana, a next-generation family concierge service.

Yoky: During the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s work styles and how they spent time with their family saw drastic changes. At that time, we conducted surveys to get a deeper look at the challenges underlying their problems and did exhaustive research on how we could develop relevant solutions. We launched Yohana in 2021 in the US, then later in Japan, to respond to the time-consuming needs of families by proposing suggestions for meal menus, birthday presents, and so on. The Yohana team, composed of actual humans, has completed over 300,000 tasks on behalf of our customers. This work accumulated to a total of more than one million hours for our customers’ time, which we were able to give back to them. However, we have been unable to provide adequate solutions for using the time created by Yohana to strengthen family ties or improve self-care.

At Panasonic Well, we have continued our research to ensure that AI will be able to resolve challenges facing families in the future. Furthermore, a survey^*2 conducted in the US revealed that half of the “sandwich generation”^*3 parents, including myself, feel overwhelmed by stress and that 65% feel lonely. This shows that strengthening family ties and self-care are indispensable for the elderly. Consequently, we developed Umi^*4 to address these crises in family ｗell-being.

＊2: U.S. Surgeon General Issues Advisory on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Parents (August 2024).
＊3: A generation simultaneously supporting aging parents while raising children.
＊4: The word “umi” means ocean in Japanese. This name was chosen because it evokes an image of health and well-being, since it not only has a calming effect but also gives people the feeling of vastness and the availability of unlimited resources.