10 December 2019 – Teachers from Savonia University of Applied Sciences (Savonia UAS) and Savo Vocational College (Sakky) visited Sendai and FWBC from 5 to 10 December, as a part of their projects “WelTech” and “Hyvinrobo”, for wellbeing technology education and development of wellbeing robotics expertise and utilization.

On the first day, they met a local ICT company developing application for Pepper in elderly care use, where they had a good discussion about nursing care robots in Japan and Japanese government strategies on nursing care robot development. Then they moved to the next company offering exoskeleton robot wearing experiences.

On the following day, they visited a local nursing care home where several robots and digital technologies have been utilized. Through discussion with nursing care home staffs, there are pros and cons for introducing robotics in nursing care in Japan, which are similar to Finland and both sides had a lot to learn by this visit.

Then on the final day, they visited a local vocational college for nursing care, to see how students are educated in the nursing care field. The college staff let them into the classroom and they had a chance to communicate with some students. It was lovely that some students said “kiitos” to the Finnish visitors.

In addition, FWBC had a fruitful meeting and discussion with Savonia UAS and Sakky about further collaboration in the area of e-learning for nursing care staff, in that lots of digital technologies and robotics have been introducing into the nursing care and it has been challenging for staff to learn e   xtra information for their work, so they developed e-learning system which can be tested in Japan, with FWBC’s support.