NHN (181710.KS) announced on July 6 that it has formed a consortium with its senior care subsidiary NHN Wafflat and Kakao Healthcare to participate in the Ministry of Health and Welfare's "AI Smart Home Care" project, signing a business cooperation agreement for service development.
The agreement was pursued with the goal of participating in the "AI Smart Home Care" task under the AX-Sprint program, for which the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced an open call on June 26. The AX-Sprint program is a government initiative that supports the rapid commercialization of applied products utilizing artificial intelligence technology. The "AI Smart Home Care" task specifically aims to build a smart home care platform that combines various smart devices and AI technology within the actual home environments of care recipients, providing 24-hour life-integrated support for independent living.
As South Korea enters a super-aged society, demand for elderly and vulnerable population care as well as chronic disease management is rising rapidly. However, the entities managing safety, welfare check, and daily living data are currently separated from those handling health data such as blood glucose and blood pressure levels, making it difficult to utilize integrated indicators and provide comprehensive care services. In response, the Ministry of Health and Welfare is promoting an "AI Smart Home" model that combines devices, data, and AI to routinely collect daily living and health data, with AI performing integrated analysis to link the information with major care, health, and welfare programs.
Through this agreement, the three companies plan to build an AI smart home care system that realizes "Aging In Place" — enabling healthy aging in one's own home rather than in nursing facilities. The system will first collect safety, welfare check, and daily living data via smartphones, while securing real-time health indicators through digital health devices such as continuous glucose monitors (CGM) and hourly blood pressure monitors (BP). The collected data will be stored and analyzed in an integrated manner through AI infrastructure, leading to optimized care services. This will be implemented as an "integrated care model" capable of looking after care recipients through a single platform.
Each company will leverage its respective strengths in AI infrastructure, care services, and health management services to divide roles accordingly.
NHN will provide the AI infrastructure environment capable of stably processing and analyzing large-scale data. Drawing on its experience operating national AI data centers, NHN has strengthened its AI computing competitiveness, having been selected as the largest deployment operator in the 2025 national GPU procurement project.
NHN Wafflat will be responsible for actual service development and operations based on its "Wafflat AI Life Support Agent" platform, serving as the user-facing interface. The "Wafflat AI Life Support Agent" is a smartphone-based AI care platform that provides integrated management of seniors' safety, welfare checks, health, daily living, and emotional well-being. Using AI human technology, the platform delivers a user experience simulating conversations with a female life support agent in her 50s — modeled after real care workers — and has demonstrated its effectiveness with a 98% app usage rate among elderly users. Since launching in July 2024, the platform has signed agreements with 38 local governments and institutions nationwide and plans to expand to more than 50 local governments this year.
Kakao Healthcare will provide professional health management services through its AI-based mobile chronic disease management solution PASTA. Kakao Healthcare has advanced its data-driven chronic disease management structure by combining the clinical expertise of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals with AI technology. The company has practical experience in public health, including participation in local public health centers' "Smart Blood Glucose Management Program" and the Ministry of Science and ICT's "Hyper-scale AI-based Healthcare Service Development Project."
"Through this agreement, we will combine our PASTA service with NHN's platform operation experience and AI technology to create a health management model for the super-aged era," said Hwang Hee, CEO of Kakao Healthcare.
"This agreement marks the starting point for implementing an 'AI Smart Home Integrated Care Model' that organically connects AI infrastructure, care services, and health management services on a single platform," said Hwang Sun-young, Director of NHN's Legal and Policy Group and CEO of NHN Wafflat. "We will expand the consortium with companies that have specialized capabilities to successfully build a local government and public-sector standard operating model aligned with the Ministry of Health and Welfare's policy direction, and will pursue public demonstration projects in phases going forward."