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New Horizons - Career Change Research:Konosuke Temmei
February 3, 2026
Technology development for addressing the problems faced in national and regional healthcare
Konosuke Temmei
Manager
Biometrics Research Laboratories
After graduating from graduate school, Temmei secured a position in research and development at a comprehensive medical device manufacturer. He worked there for about 14 years, gaining experience in leading the entire process from planning to the development of new functions for diagnostic imaging equipment. In May 2024, he joined NEC with the goal of contributing to healthcare across a broader range of areas and was appointed as a manager in the following year. Temmei is currently involved in the research and development of hospital management support systems while also helping team members achieve their goals and supporting their career growth.
Aiming for comprehensive rather than point-by-point healthcare support
In my previous job, I worked for about 14 years in a research and development position at a comprehensive medical device manufacturer. I was involved in the development of new technologies for diagnostic imaging equipment such as X-rays, CT (Computed Tomography), and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). My primary mission was to help expand the market share of our devices by creating new technologies and products to meet customer needs each year. Ultimately, I was in charge of everything from planning new functions to leading their development. Over a period of about 10 years, we were able to successfully increase our market share by more than 15%.
While I found it fulfilling to spend my days visiting hospitals across Japan to confront issues on the front lines and continuing to conduct research and development, I began to feel the limitations of that path at a certain point. Because the manufacturer where I previously worked focused only on the areas of diagnosis and treatment within healthcare, I started to feel that I could only engage with healthcare in a “point-by-point” way. As I started to consider whether I could contribute to overall Japanese healthcare in a “comprehensive” way rather than just through devices in specific areas, I came across a job opening at NEC. I was attracted to NEC for positioning medical and healthcare as growth fields and seeking to develop a wide range of businesses centered around AI technologies and decided to tackle the challenge of APPLYING.
Contributing to regional healthcare through hospital management support
Since joining the company, I have been researching and developing a solution-based AI to support hospital management. This system addresses hospital profitability, an issue which has been highlighted in recent years, and supports activities to improve management.
Since my previous position focused on technology development in diagnosis and treatment, hospital management is a completely different area for me. However, while visiting regional hospitals in my previous position, I saw the state of regional healthcare with my own eyes and felt a keen sense of crisis. No matter how advanced diagnostic imaging and treatment technologies became, regional healthcare activities would collapse if the hospitals themselves disappeared. To preserve regional healthcare, solutions that can reliably support hospital management should be able to help solve fundamental issues. This belief has become a major source of motivation for me. I apply my previous experience in communicating with hospital staff and involvement in everything from planning to the development of medical devices while filling in the gaps in my knowledge through study and by asking questions to people working on the front lines of healthcare.
One aspect that I found interesting after joining NEC was how the company sets research themes. In my previous position, the R&D team was positioned within the business unit, which meant that the business unit had significant influence and most of our work focused on creating products to meet their requests. In contrast, researchers at NEC are able to propose their own research themes. There are events such as pitch contests to solicit new research themes, and proposals can be made at any time even outside of such opportunities. Through such systems, I strongly feel the company’s commitment to valuing the individuality of each researcher in laboratories that operate as separate organizations from the business divisions.
Scale and trust that are capable of directly influencing the nation
The NEC systems that I am truly grateful for are the remote work and flextime policies. In my previous job, I had to report to work at a fixed time, which made it difficult for me to participate in child care. Now I am able to freely adjust the times when I start and end work. In fact, just this morning my child pleaded, “I want Daddy to take me to nursery school,” so I pushed back my start time to go instead of my wife. My wife also works at a company, and the current situation now enables her to work wholeheartedly.
Furthermore, I find the diversity of the NEC team members to be a very interesting aspect. The team at my previous job consisted of engineers from the same field, but the members of my current team include researchers in image recognition, large language models (LLM), and graph AI. In addition, we also collaborate with team members at NEC Laboratories America who are researching cutting-edge technologies. When discussing solutions to solve some kind of problem, ideas emerge from innovative and diverse approaches, which I believe is a major advantage in the advancement of research and development.
My goal is to use technology to solve Japan’s healthcare problems such as improving the quality of medical treatment and maintaining healthcare access. Currently, I am working on these problems with individual hospitals through a management support approach, but I hope to also contribute to regional healthcare and national healthcare policies going forward. NEC is a company that supports a wide range of important infrastructure including public infrastructure, satellites, undersea cables, and medical facilities. We are actually involved in many projects carried out together with local governments and public agencies. There are very few companies with this level of scale and trust, so I hope to continue contributing to Japanese healthcare as much as possible from the environment within NEC.
- *The information posted on this website is the information at the time of publication.