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Knowing Me, Knowing You |
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Doro has already made advancements; the Doro PhoneEasy 610 includes a button that when pressed, tells a central call centre that X patient has taken X medication on time; if no confirmation comes through from the patient, the case is escalated, with a reminder text message and then a phone call from the call centre of required. That service will be launched later this year, and will appeal to healthcare providers and insurers, as well as some mobile operators, Millington says. In February the company announced it was an industrial partner in a European Union (EU) funded research project working to create an advanced virtual user model for the development of adapted and easy to use products for people with special needs. The EU initiated the project with the aim of preventing the marginalisation of people with impaired vision, hearing and mobility, with the primary target people those over 65. In the project, named VICON, Doro is cooperating with scientific institutions including the University of Bremen, Fraunhofer FIT, RNID and NCBI, to develop an Android interface for an Android device. Millington states: “Bringing out an Android device, rather than using our own proprietary platform, enables us to work in a wider field, bringing out more health care applications, which is an important area for us, and Android also enables us to work with much larger screens than is possible on our own platform today. We can then introduce touchscreens and other smart aspects that end users desire; no matter how old you are, you still desire things the same way you did as when you were younger. This is why we are also stepping up the look and feel of all our devices now.” |
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Money, Money, Money |
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The new Android device developed with the EU and its other partners should debut at Mobile World Congress 2012, says Millington, with a commercial launch due around April or May next year. “It’s very exciting,” Millington comments. “So we’re putting an awful lot of R&D into this project; altogether, 10% of our revenue. It’s quite a high figure, but the fine details of getting this right is very important in getting these devices accepted by older generations.” Growth for Doro is on the cards, according to Millington. He remarks: “Our plans for the next 12 months will include continuing to build easy to use devices for the over-65s. We already have 1% of the total UK GSM device market, and 3% in Ireland and also in the Nordics, but in the UK I’d like to take that to over 3% by the end of December 2011. We also plan to continue to build our healthcare platform, and to launch more m-health devices later this year and early next. So quite ambitious plans!” |
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