What Was The Wii Fit Body Check Channel?
One day while watching videos on YouTube, I came across one talking about lost media for the Nintendo Wii, overall the video was… passable, however one part of it infuriated me.
While talking about one piece of media the creator who seemingly done zero actual research beyond reading a short thread on it on the now-dead Twitter, had this to say:
[…]All the known information about this thing is either gatekept by random Japanese people or it’s just completely lost to time.
What do you mean “gatekept by random Japanese people” as if saying that by itself isn’t incredibly racist.
So I decided to do the research for them.
The Wii Fit Body Check Channel (Wii Fit からだチェックチャンネル)
The Wii Fit Body Check Channel (Will be referred too as Wii Fit BCC for brevity) also known as “Wii Fit からだチェックチャンネル” (Wii Fit Karadachekku Chan’neru) was developed in around 2009 by Nintendo to be utilized with a service developed by Nippon Electric Company, Panasonic, and Hitachi.
According to this article it was a health promotion service offered to employees and their families. (Quote below, Google Translated)
NEC and NEC Mobile Link will begin offering a service that links the health promotion support service using mobile phones that was launched in December last year with “Wii Fit Body Check Channel” via the Internet to employees and families of the NEC Group from April. By using the SaaS platform provided by NEC, small-scale use is also possible, and the company aims to introduce the service in 150 cases over the next three years, including sales to outside the group.
The system allowed for people to measure themselves via the Wii Fit BCC and send the results to health guidance services and receive advice back via email.
Source: Hitachi News Release (https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/month/2009/01/0127.html)
According to the originally linked article, the future plan was to then use the measurement data “to create unique instruction programs for instructors and training organizations, and provide it as an ASP service.”
However it seems to have potentially never made it out of its initial prototypes as according to this last sentence from the article:
Hitachi will begin prototyping the system in-house from February and will make a decision based on the results.
I also found this press release from NEC regarding the software. It lists the following main features (Google Translated):
Here’s Nintendo’s as well however there’s not much new information besides mentioning how step data from the DS game “Walking to Understand Life Rhythms DS” can also be utilized.
Hitachi’s goes into a bit more detail regarding other aspects on how users would have two-way communication with instructors through the channel:
Overall, with what we know of the software, it likely never made it to these stages of development or had any of these features implemented before quietly getting shelved.
This was all I found about the software by just simply googling the Japanese name of the software. It’s disappointing to say the least to see a YouTuber so disinterested in the subject that not only do they spout racist nonsense, that they also completely fail at providing to their audience as well due to their lack of research. If they had just copy pasted the name into a search engine they would’ve found it easily.
Additional Sources/Articles
- “Wii Fit Body Check Channel” uses Wii for remote health guidance service (Markezine)
- NEC launches health promotion support service in collaboration with “Wii Fit” (NEC Press Release)
- “Wii Fit Body Check Channel” developed to support specific health guidance system for Wii; electronics manufacturer to start offering to health insurance associations from April (Nintendo Press Release)
- Developing a remote health guidance platform system linked to “Wii Fit” (Hitachi Press Release)
- Panasonic web page showing slide show of products (I didn’t see anything regarding BCC on this page but it was linked by another article so I’m putting it here for prosperity sake)
- “Plissimo Sigusa” is a specific health guidance support system that can be linked to the home video game console “Wii” (Innervision, showcases a setup of channel with a balance board)
