Panasonic Group
Magazine

2025.01.31
Interview with Executive Officer of Panasonic Holdings and Panasonic Well Director
Panasonic Well Venturing into the Future of Family Wellness

Yoky Matsuoka, Executive Officer of Panasonic Holdings Corporation and Panasonic Well Director, took the stage with Yuki Kusumi, Group CEO, during the opening keynote at CES 2025. She announced that Umi, a holistic digital family wellness platform and coach, will be launched in the US as an example of Panasonic Go.*1 We interviewed Yoky about Panasonic Well, the vision to commercializing Umi, and the outlook for the future.

*1: A global corporate growth initiative promoting business transformation using AI.


Integration of wellness and technologies: Panasonic Well taking up challenges

Panasonic Well, led by Yoky, is a venture and business incubator committed to building new services and technologies that improve the well-being of all people, with a focus on the wellness of modern families. Yoky is an accomplished executive and technologist with over two decades of leadership experience. She is a renowned robotics and neuroscience expert, recognized for her groundbreaking work and honored with the MacArthur Genius Award.

Yoky: Partly due to my past experiences, Panasonic Well tends to be seen as simply a developer of AI or technologies. However, we are able to create solutions at the intersection of responsible tech and human care because we understand what is needed to achieve wellness. This is Panasonic Well's strength.

Yoky Matsuoka and Panasonic Well staff (at the CES 2025 Panasonic booth)

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.

Umi: A new AI partner supporting family wellness

Yoky: Umi will start by providing an app as a family well-being coach that facilitates behavioral changes toward achieving family wellness. By encouraging multi-generation families to cultivate wellness habits that fit their diverse needs and lifestyles, it can be a family partner that supports their health and well-being. Activities & fitness, nutrition, sleep, and stress management are essential for wellness, and among these, the first two have been increasingly attracting attention in recent years. Accordingly, Umi's AI agent assists in behavioral changes for all family members from their childhood, especially in the areas of activities & fitness and nutrition.

From the video shown during the keynote. Left: Umi suggests ideas for enjoying a weekend, and family members exchange opinions.

Right: Umi explains key points of communication with elderly parents based on advice from experts.

Specifically, using wide-ranging data learned through questions and communications with family members, Umi's AI sets personalized goals for individuals and suggests necessary actions to meet these goals while considering their feasibility. For example, Umi may propose a monthly target number of steps for a user, but if it learns through conversations that it is not feasible due to the user's busy schedule, Umi may set another more achievable target for eating more nutritious meals. Since the priorities of activities & fitness and nutrition vary among individuals, it is essential to tailor this process for each family member.

One of Umi's features enables all family members including children to share conversations, not only 1-to-1 communication. This coordinates family wellness through communication and eventually leads to behavioral change. We delve deeply into the app features like tone of voice and tweak between strong and soft tones to make suggestions best suited for encouraging behavioral changes. Umi also visualizes your progress and enables you to review the outcomes to establish actions as routines.

Panasonic Well: Committed to building a wellness ecosystem

Dr. Myechia Minter-Jordan, CEO of AARP

During the keynote, Yoky introduced the Panasonic Well Partner Collective, which consists of leading health and wellness businesses, organizations, and research institutions, as well as a partnership with the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP),*5 an NPO with approximately forty million members in the US. Dr. Myechia Minter-Jordan, CEO of AARP, took the stage and emphasized that technology is critical to living a healthy life for an increasing number of older people and their families around the world. Yoky also introduced the Family Wellness Innovation Challenge, a global competition co-sponsored by AARP and Panasonic Well for start-ups who pursue relevant technologies and services, and the prize winners were announced at the end.

*5: Aiming at improving the quality of life of older people, AARP provides information and support related to health, economic, and social challenges.

Yoky: During the development of Umi, we placed much emphasis on building a business ecosystem.*6 Typical examples are partnerships with companies that provide services as needed or those that give expert advice based on the communications carried out between users and Umi.

*6: A large economic network of various companies and organizations that collaborate to create greater value.

Group CEO Kusumi joined the award ceremony of the Family Wellness Innovation Challenge and praised the grand prix winner.

The sandwich generation is under a great deal of emotional, time, and economic pressure, and more than half of the families in the US face these burdens.*7 Partnerships are critical for resolving such issues. The Family Wellness Innovation Challenge is a significant step toward expanding such partnerships. We received over 550 applications from around the world, including Japan. I joined the latter half of the screening process myself and interviewed applicants in person. We announced the winners at CES partly to find partners who align with our initiatives, and many participants actually approached us demonstrating their interest. By taking this opportunity, we want to further expand the ecosystem and respond to a wider range of use cases.

*7: World Economic Forum "More than half of Americans in their 40s are 'sandwiched' between an aging parent and their own children" (April 2022).

Daniela Amodei, Co-founder and President of Anthropic

Since collaboration with AI partners is indispensable in promoting Panasonic Go, Group CEO Kusumi announced in his keynote a strategic partnership with Anthropic in the US, a company that shares the Panasonic Group's belief that AI must be safe, understandable, and designed to deeply align with human values. In response, Yoky stated that Umi will be equipped with Anthropic's Claude AI assistant. Daniela Amodei, Co-founder and President of Anthropic, joined her and explained that Claude has added value in all aspects of business, from customer service to decision-making, over the years. She expressed her determination to help the Panasonic Group enhance its overall creativity while delivering better business results by leveraging Claude's high reliability and safety.

Yoky: Anthropic has grown while placing great emphasis on ethics, privacy, and responsibility, and its large language models (LLMs) have gained a high reputation in the US. Umi, committed to supporting the health and well-being for all with wellness as a gateway, cannot be viable without innovations based on Anthropic's AI ethics. Anthropic AI is particularly excellent at family calendar management and chat promotion, so we will be able to provide a service where Umi discusses the scheduling of hospital visits with users, prepares and manages their schedule with AI, and then even reserves a taxi. We expect further collaboration with a diverse range of partners by expanding the breadth of services in this way.

Umi and Panasonic Well's future strategy

Yoky: I feel that being able to demonstrate Umi's capabilities at CES was very meaningful. Umi's first key vision for the future is to provide a one-stop solution. We hope to develop Umi into a platform that knows all family members well, capable of making good suggestions in response to their wellness consultations without the need to access different sources.

The Umi booth at CES 2025, where many visitors attentively listened to the explanations of booth staff while trying out screen demonstrations

In front of the Partner Collective panel displays. Quite a few representatives of companies expressed their support and consulted with staff of Panasonic Well.

The second vision is to strengthen the ecosystem by expanding our network of partnerships. We will select partners based on their attitudes toward AI ethics and customer needs. We hope that more companies and organizations will participate in the Umi ecosystem in the future, even if their various services overlap. We believe that optimal solutions for problems and concerns can be provided to more customers only when Umi is backed up by a diverse range of partners.

Umi will launch services from the US while aiming to establish a global ecosystem to ensure deployment in other countries and regions. The Panasonic Group is unrivaled in its touchpoints with customers in households and it is important to leverage this advantage. We, as the provider of Umi, look forward to collaborating closely with the business divisions to identify mutually beneficial approaches to solve our customer pain points.

While Panasonic Well is a company capable of making customers around the world healthy and happy through wellness solutions, we want to be the forerunner that will lead Panasonic Go, an initiative to promote corporate transformation of Panasonic. We will pioneer the creation of new products and businesses by leveraging AI and other advanced technologies. We will also establish AI platforms in collaboration with partners and our operating companies.

Furthermore, we are conscious of our contributions to the AI-based transformation of the entire Panasonic Group. In addition to promoting teamwork with departments in charge of AI at Panasonic Holdings and other organizations, we will provide inspiration and lead initiatives to encourage every Panasonic Group employee to embrace AI, unleashing tremendous progress in their tasks and in the products and services they develop.

Panasonic Go aims to expand AI-driven hardware, software, and solutions businesses to approximately 30% of the Panasonic Group's revenue by 2035. However, the Panasonic Group won't be able to meet the goal only through the efforts of Panasonic Well and Blue Yonder. All business divisions and departments across the Panasonic Group need to create AI-driven revenue streams. We at Panasonic Well hope to contribute to the attainment of our goal by implementing the approaches I've described. If we succeed in meeting our goal, the day may come when the entire Panasonic Group is regarded as a leader in AI technologies.

Under Yoky's leadership, Panasonic Well will continue to provide innovative solutions driven by AI and other advanced technologies, thus contributing to family wellness. It will also promote AI use throughout the Panasonic Group's businesses and work at the forefront of Panasonic Go.

The content in this website is accurate at the time of publication but may be subject to change without notice.
Please note therefore that these documents may not always contain the most up-to-date information.
Please note that German, French and Chinese versions are machine translations, so the quality and accuracy may vary.

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