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Recommendation 1.1B: Create opportunity to provide testing support for product enhancement—
especially for products in the prototype stage. An example of
opportunities that concurrently
such support is exhibited in advanced rehabilitative assistive
provide product evaluation and technologies service centres.
enhancement capabilities
As depicted in Figure 10, the National Rehabilitation Centre
(NRC) in South Korea runs a unique Rehabilitation Robot
In our Gerontech Landscape Report 1.0, we identified “lack of
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Gym. This gym not only offers innovative robotic treatment
testing ground for new products” (Gap 13) as one of the
options to rehabilitation hospital patients; it also offers the
five key gaps facing Hong Kong’s gerontech ecosystem.
simultaneous possibility for clinicians to conduct clinical trials
Following the publication of our report, HKCSS and SIE Fund
on the rehabilitation robots’ treatment effectiveness and for
organised follow-up stakeholder engagement workshops with
engineers to receive user feedback for product enhancement on
over 140 participants to brainstorm possible solutions (SIE
various rehabilitation robots. The clinicians and engineers are
Fund, 2021). One of the key areas that stakeholders agreed
provided with government funding to conduct clinical trials and
on is the need for testing support, which is reflected in the GT
design product enhancements at the Rehabilitation Robot Gym,
Platform’s prioritisation of creating testing protocols for various
namely through the NRC’s Translational Research Program
priority products within both residential and community settings
for Rehabilitation Robots and Business Support Program for
(SIE Fund, 2017; 2018).
Rehabilitation Robots (United Nations Economic and Social
Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), 2021).
The current focus of testing support provided by the GT Platform
is to test the product effectiveness of mature gerontech products
that are already available on the market. This makes sense as
there is a need within the current ecosystem, particularly from
the Government’s perspective given their heavy investment
into gerontech, to better understand the actual added social
and economic value of gerontech products within the context of
elderly and rehabilitation service delivery. Yet, there is a further

14 The NRC is a government-affiliated agency, consisting of a rehabilitation hospital and a rehabilitation research institute, that is run by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in South
Korea (UNESCAP, 2021).

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