Yunji's impressions about Mememtum
We are currently working with a girl from Korea who is helping us with the marketing of Mememtum. She is a hard worker and has a very insightful view of situations. We asked her to tell us what is Mememtum for her, the prinicipal advantages and disadvantages and Mememtum potential in the Asian market; we share her impressions with you all. Thanks Yunji
What I understood so far is that: Mememtum is a mobile application that enables remote monitoring and objective measures of movement disorders. Doctors and hospitals could benefit through saving the consultation time and reducing the cost. Patients benefit through reducing the travelling time and receiving more regular feedback from the doctor. Since mememtum is useful at monitoring patient’s conditions, researchers or pharmaceutical companies may also benefit by collecting the data for progression after the treatment for several year.
Some of the major features that appeal positively to the customers are the cloud server and numerical results of patient’s present state. Before using mememtum, I thought that mememtum’s ability to test the patients by itself was its main advantage. However, after actually seeing how it works, I thought that quantifying the results and being able to remotely monitor the patients’ regularly updated data could be stronger advantages.
I thought that the next version of mememtum will be technically more interesting. The next version, which would possibly include hand tremor detection, eye gaze tracking and gait analysis, would definitely be much more appealing to the customers, because it will strengthen the application’s ability itself even further. It will add distinct value for mememtum and differentiate it from other similar applications as well. Mentioning that although mememtum is already able to detect and monitor movement disorders, we are continuously developing new tests and features to achieve better standards and accuracy could be a plus.
Recent trend of ageing population could increase the risk of having movement disorders throughout the life time and increased awareness and diagnosis on such disorders may certainly increase the need for treatment and monitoring of them. However, despite the trend of increasing market and numerous advantages of mememtum, there are some possible drawbacks, which are especially apparent in Asian markets.
First of all, for non-IT-related customers, believing mobile application as a doctor is not easy (even though it is connected to the doctor). Since no other external devices are included, customers may not fully believe smartphones, because of their frequent mistakes (such as google map not finding the exact direction or position/ some applications not sensing things correctly).
Secondly, major target audiences to use mememtum’s tests are patients with movement disorders (doctors use mememtum for monitoring). The target audience should thus be redefined as: movement disorder patient who owns a smartphone. However, movement disorders are prevalent in older ages and elderlies are rather unlikely to own smartphones. This limits the number of target audiences.
Thirdly, only middle-upper to upper class patients could be targeted. In a lot of the developing countries, there are not many clinics or centres for movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease (For example, there is only one cancer hospital in the whole southern part of Vietnam). Unless the patients have a fatal disease, they are less likely to visit hospitals or make payments to get regular updates from the doctor. Thus, the market size is very very small, unless we are searching for developed Asian countries such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea or Taiwan.
Author: Yunji Choi