Background
Heat illness is a familiar, year-round health risk that strikes when the body's temperature regulation fails in hot, humid conditions. In Japan, older adults account for around 60% of heat-illness emergency transports and are more likely to develop the condition indoors and have it become severe. Age-related declines in thermoregulation and reduced sensitivity to heat and thirst mean symptoms can progress with little subjective awareness, raising the need for tools that help people notice warning signs and act early.
The program
On 26 May 2026, Otsuka Pharmaceutical began offering "Heat Illness Prevention VR", a new program within FACEDUO — a virtual-reality training program it operates as a joint business with digital-health VR developer JollyGood. Built on Otsuka's more than 30 years of heat-illness prevention work, the program is designed to drop into seminars and educational sessions run by local governments, medical institutions and companies, with the aim of changing older adults' prevention behaviour.
How it works
The program comprises two modules of about 12 minutes each:
- Recognizing the Signs of Heat Illness — participants begin in a severe heat-illness scenario and move backward in time through moderate and mild stages, experiencing first-hand how warning signs such as fatigue, dizziness and muscle cramps escalate when overlooked, and learning the appropriate initial response at each stage.
- How Heat Illness Prevention Changes with Age — set in the daily life of an older adult living alone, this module uses interactive dialogue to surface the gap between subjective perceptions ("I don't feel hot yet") and the body's actual condition, including overlooked indoor and night-time risks and reluctance to use air conditioning.
Delivery
The experience runs as a self-contained, first-person 360° VR simulation on a standalone headset — shown white-labelled as "FACE DUO" in Otsuka's materials — so it can be played with minimal setup inside existing events. Each session is short by design, letting facilitators fit it into seminars and health events for both older adults and the people who support them.
Medical supervision and wider context
The content was developed under the medical supervision of Dr. Shoji Yokobori of Nippon Medical School, whose comment appears below. The launch sits within Otsuka's broader heat-illness prevention activity, which includes health-collaboration agreements with more than 800 local governments nationwide and Japan's first heat-illness prevention partnership with the Ministry of the Environment, signed in 2023.
