Wii Fit Body Check Channel (lost Japanese-exclusive Wii health-checking channel app; 2009)

The channel banner as it appears in Wii Menu.

Status: Partially Lost

Wii Fit Body Check Channel is a Japan-exclusive Wii channel, developed by Nintendo, with co-ordination with Hitachi, Panasonic, and NEC, with all but Panasonic issuing press releases about it on 27 January 2009, receiving a fair bit of media coverage.

The app combined data from the Japanese versions of Wii Fit and the Nintendo DS game Personal Trainer: Walking, with the stated goal being to help reduce the costs of health insurance, and to meet a law introduced in April 2008 that required medical check-ups to reduce metabolistic illnesses, with each co-ordinating company integrating the channel with their own internal health systems and health clinics. A graph was made for the press releases that explained how the data would be transferred back and forth between the employee and the companies.

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  The channel's banner as it appears in the channel selection menu.

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  The data transferring graph.

The channel was never made officially available to regular users, instead relying entirely on Wii Download Tickets issued by participating companies to distribute the app. After having downloaded the app, user registration beyond the main menu required special SD cards distributed by the companies.

Hitachi applied the channel as a application service provider for instructors, NEC offered it to their employees as a software-as-a-service, while Panasonic Medical Solutions implemented it in their Plissimo Sigusa software suite.

While the channel was released as planned in April 2009, with the wide availability of WADs of the channel attesting to it, no info, images, or footage of the company-specific features have been found, and media coverage of the channel ceased abruptly in May or June 2009, leaving no info about the post-release phase, its shutdown date (if any), or how the Personal Trainer: Walking data was imported into the channel.

The channel turned out to also support data from Wii Fit Plus, a game that was released 4~5 months after Body Check Channel (1 October 2009), the only known post-release aspect to have emerged about the channel since its release.

Besides the channel banner, only one video exists of the channel as of 5 March 2024, which was published on 2 April 2021, and which only got to the main menu, where the available choices were limited to "New Registration" and "Wii Menu".

The video in question.

Another video that goes more into technical aspects, while using footage from the previous video. The Body Check Channel part starts at 26:39.

To even reach the main menu, the player has to have a previous savefile from the Japanese versions of either Wii Fit or Wii Fit Plus, and a valid Friend Code on the Wii console itself (the latter of which excludes vanilla Dolphin setups, whose Friend Codes are 0000 0000 0000 0000; a NAND import into Dolphin would make it able to reach the main menu).