TOKYO—Toshiba and KDDI will jointly launch a field test for communications between digital consumer electronics and mobile handsets next March.
About 500 households in Tokyo and Aichi Prefecture, central Japan, will participate in the field test, which is designed to verify technology that collects user information, such as preferences and daily activities, and sends the necessary information to users’ handsets by e-mail.
KDDI will deploy an optical fiber network to each of the 500 participating households, and Toshiba will provide digital consumer electronics, such as a refrigerator with an agent system and a liquid crystal display (LCD) panel, to each of the participants.
When a user inputs a food on the refrigerator’s panel, the data is transmitted to Toshiba’s data center and saved on the server. The server is pre-input with participating store and commodities data. When a mobile user—a participant—visits one of the stores, the food name input on the refrigerator panel is sent to the mobile by e-mail as a reminder while shopping for the food.
Both firms are targeting to launch commercial-based service of the system “in the near future,” although they have not decided exactly when they will launch the commercial service.
