The well-being fad has found its way into the cellular phone market. Handsets providing various sorts of health care functions such as measuring fat layers and blood-sugar level are being released one by one. Samsung Electronics presented a brand-new cellular phone last week, the SPH-E3330, which can measure one¡¯s fat level. After entering one¡¯s name, weight, and height, a slight touch of the finger on the measuring device displays one¡¯s body fat level. The measured data can be estimated by daily, weekly, and monthly units in a graphical chart. The handset could be bought for around W450,000.
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LG Electronics¡¯s Cyon KP8400 handset for diabetics, which provides various health care services for diabetics such as blood-tests, dietary recommendations, exercise programs and drug administration. /Yonhap
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The so-called diabetes hand set released by LG Electronics back in July, the LG-KP8400, has won steady popularity. This handset, equipped to measure blood-sugar levels, not only manages blood-sugar level, diet, and medication prescriptions, but also provides long-distance medical consultations. Placing a litmus paper stained with one¡¯s blood on the device shows one¡¯s blood-sugar level. They also plan to release a "stress phone" that informs one of his or her stress level by checking their heart rates by early next year.
Recently, the Silver-nano handsets, which are thinly coated with silver, have won much popularity. Silver-nano technology is the mixing of raw materials with silver mixed in at the nano meter level (one-billionth of a meter). It is effective for preventing the spread of germs as well as sterilization and deodorization. SK Teletech released its IM-7700 cellular phone with Silver-nano technology for the first time back in September, resulting in nearly 100,000 sales in only two months. With a built-in mega pixel digital camera, it can store pictures and MP3 music files up to a 1000 mega-bytes. Samsung also put on the market last month a Silver-nano handset the SCH-S140, coated with silver.
¡°Normally, there are about 25,000 germs on one cellular phone,¡± said a researcher at SK, adding, ¡°Research shows that if you were to cultivate germs on a normal handset, 70 to 80 percent of them would remain even after a 24 hours, but 99.9 percent of germs disappear on a Silver-nano handset within only three hours.¡±
(Kim Ki-hong, darma90@chosun.com )
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