Japan Post's Mimamori — Postal-Worker Home Visits for Elderly Living Alone

Japan has one of the highest shares of elderly people living alone in the world, and much of the country's rural population is served by a shrinking network of care workers. Japan Post — with roughly 20,000 branches nationwide, more than any bank or convenience-store chain — repurposed its existing delivery workforce into a low-tech digital-inclusion channel: the Mimamori ("watching over") Home-Visit Service.
Launched in October 2017, a subscribing household receives one home visit a month from a postal worker, who checks on living and health conditions and can send a written report to relatives living elsewhere, plus invitations to subscriber lunches at the post office. By February 2019 the paid service (roughly 1,050 yen/month) had 10,592 users. In January 2022 Japan Post extended the model with smart speakers and a purpose-built app offered to local governments and corporations, adding a digital layer on top of the human visit.
An independently published, peer-reviewed evaluation (Ashida et al.) tracked 524 subscribers (mean age 79.5) using the WHO-5 wellbeing index and the LSNS-6 social-network scale between January/February and August 2019. Averaged across all subscribers, mental-health scores barely moved (WHO-5 16.4 to 16.3) — the service did not show a broad, service-wide mental-health benefit. But among the subgroup living alone with the smallest social networks, WHO-5 scores rose meaningfully, from 14.2 to 15.3, while other subgroups saw no change or a decline. The honest reading is that a monthly human check-in visit measurably helps the most isolated users and does little for everyone else — evidence for targeting the service rather than assuming a uniform benefit.

Read the full analysis: https://www.japanpost.jp/en/sustainability/society/healthy-living/others.html