What if smarwatches could do everything from supplying health, medical treatment, and patient care to satisfying elderly people’s living requirements and caring for their psychological needs?

Guidercarecare, a born and bred Taiwanese technology company, is currently putting this vision into practice. Even Qualcomm Vice CEO, Don Jones, has specifically stated that he would like to collaborate with Guidercare.

Three major trends: Guidercare steps into the smartwatch market.

What is the key fundamental characteristic of a startup? Guidercare Chairman of the Board, Xu Bin-xiang, believes it is trends. Consequently, when searching for direction in the initial stages of a startup, Guidercare chose three types of mutually overlapping trends to set the future direction of the company’s development -- they chose to focus on healthcare smartwatches for elderly people.

Early in 2008 when Guidercare was first founded, they immediately recognized that ageing is an unavoidable condition throughout the world. Furthermore, they also saw that in the future, mobile telecommunications will be more and more developed, and the development of sensory applications will also flourish.

These three trends allowed Guidercare to take a step ahead of the majority of other technology companies and enter the wearable devices market, which at the time was just beginning to take shape. Guidercare began to undertake research and development of healthcare products for ageing people with the family household as its focus.

Although Guidercare entered the market early and had the advantage of being ahead of the competitors, they still faced formidable obstacles from product design, developing molds, and formatting to supply chains for production. Because it was a small-scale company, the larger manufacturers at the time looked down upon them and were not willing to accept these types of small orders. Smaller manufacturers were not yet in place and produced poor-quality products. As a result, Guidercare could only compromise and make the first-generation smartwatches that were not very successful. Xu Bin-xiang jokingly stated that they could only sell the first-generation products to people who absolutely needed them.

Figure I: Guidercare Chairman of the Board, Xu Bin-xiang

However, after having the experience of producing the first generation products, Guidercare further developed their products’ capabilities, and at the end of last year they rolled out the second-generation Angel series products. In addition to improving the hardware design, Guidercare also enhanced their products’ after-sales cloud application system.

The goal was to make it easy for elderly people to wear it on their wrists. Therefore, as soon as the sons and daughters use an APP on their smartphones to configure the settings for the functions on their parents’ smartwatches, even elderly people who are not used to using technology products will be able to quickly learn how to use them.

The competitors produce excellent products, but my products are well- priced. When the competitors’ products are also cheap, I withdraw.

Nevertheless, these few functions are not the only selling points. Smartwatches made by large companies, such as Samsung or Sony can also readily do similar things. Furthermore, merely having these few functions is not enough to attain the goal of allowing parents to be safe at home while their sons and daughters go out without being concerned. In order to truly accomplish this goal and not allow the competitors to overtake them, just focusing on hardware was not enough. Guidercare found another breakthough point, and it was software and services.

The era of mobile internet has arrived and changed many things. Among them, the service models brought about by cloud computing has challenged the inertia of Taiwanese hardware manufacturers’ ideas about making profits. Xu Bin-xian, whose background was at IBM, clearly believes that hardware only provides one avenue for entering the market. It allows users to obtain a service medium.

However, it is software and service that can genuinely supply a higher and more long-term value. “I am not afraid of product imitation; I am only afraid that services will not be done well,” he said, and he gave the following example: Apple’s largest profits come from hardware sales; however, it is software and services that sustain the hardware sales.

As a result, after stepping into the smartwatch market, Guidercare was determined to create a platform to allow businesses to supply services and for consumers to meet their needs. “Because the company is small, we are unable to be extremely radical or innovative in our product development. We are instead able to take mature and mainstream technologies and make them into excellent services.”

Xu Bin-xiang points out that market operations often have four stages: “1.) The competitors do not have a product, but I have it. 2.) The competitors have it, but I do it extremely well. 3.) The competitors do it extremely well, but my product is well-priced. 4.) The competitors’ product is also well-priced, so I withdraw from making it.

He explains that in the first three stages, you make what other people do not have, or you make products that have more functions, are better, and are cheaper than the competitors. However, when the competitors can make products that are better and cheaper, that is when you withdraw from manufacturing hardware and shift towards a service model.

Guidercare can take the accumulated competitive advantages in value from software and services and connect its services to the hardware competitors’ devices. Then the software and services can be also be integrated with the market ecosystem in order to continue to provide a broad range of services.

We have great ambitions, and in the future we hope to be able to establish a Disease Center that is directed towards different chronic illnesses and to supply various types of patient care and information about medical treatment.

Through this administrative system we plan to be able to instantly provide users with useful information and even work in cooperation with hospitals in order to supply education about ageing and allow elderly people to have a greater understanding of their living and psychological conditions when they are confronted with illnesses. Furthermore, we plan to provide on demand and on schedule services through this platform.

In addition to this, Guidercare also hopes to go a step further and connect with other local service businesses, such as shops selling healthcare products for elderly people and taxi shuttle service providers, in order to supply broad-reaching onsite medical treatment healthcare services that allow elderly people to have more convenient lifestyles.

“We hope to do make some more suitable products for the needs of ageing users at a deeper level and then proceed to shape a local ecosystem with a win-win state of affairs for us and other local service providers.”

Localized Services – Guidercare strides towards the international

Guidercare’s concept is not just creating a market with local businesses. Hopefully by wearing a simple device on their bodies, users can have access to synchronized information that they can carry with them, and services can be supplied to them more directly. In addition, local businesses will be able to use this to expand their services and create a win-win service model that allows for resources to be more effectively maximized.

“Simply stated, we are supplying a platform for referring services, and we can refer elderly people to suitable service providers to meet their requirements through the platform,” explained Xu Bin-xiang. This kind of service model will differ according to the needs of different localities; therefore, the simplest way is to allow local businesses to collectively participate and naturally shape the local ecosystem.

Finally, when users’ health information and requirements are gathered into the cloud platform and Big Data takes shape, Guidercare will take this data to further understand information about consumers, such as what they like, their trends, and their group distributions, and it will function as a company for accessing services.

“In the future, we will rely on this data to transform technology into service with excellent value.”

To this end, Guidercare is currently changing and progressively reinventing itself as a company that supplies service platforms. It is precisely this ideal that allowed them to win the recognition of Qualcomm Life and to receive an invitation to the California headquarters for a meeting with Vice-CEO Don Jones. Despite the disadvantages of being a small company and not yet being able to form partnerships, Guidercare has not given up on this kind of opportunity, and they have started preparing to establish a joint venture in California while also positioning themselves for future collaborations.

While the market is still searching for the future direction of wearable devices, and speculating about the functions on the iWatch, Guidercare has already clearly found its own position and merit.