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

The channel banner as it appears in Wii Menu.

Status: Lost

Wii Fit Body Check Channel (Wii Fit からだチェックチャンネル) is a Japan-exclusive Wii channel, developed by Nintendo,^[1] with co-ordination with Hitachi,^[2] Panasonic,^[3] and NEC,^[4] with all but Panasonic issuing press releases about it on 27 January 2009, receiving a fair bit of media coverage.^[5]

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,^[6] 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 employees and the companies.

The channel's banner as it appears in the channel selection menu.
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 an application service provider for instructors,^[7] 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 WAD file format dumps of the core channel itself (i.e. the main menu and the pre-"main menu" setup) 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.

The setup screen that confirms the game supports savefiles from Wii Fit Plus. The text means roughly "Wii Fit Plus save data was found. Switching the reference data to the Wii Fit Plus save data."

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).

On June 21st, 2023, a cheat code was discovered in Personal Trainer: Walking to connect to a Wii (Press L, press R, press X, then hold B), with internal files in Wii Fit Body Check Channel explicitly mentioning the cheat code as how to set up data uploads from Personal Trainer: Walking. Though the cheat code is confirmed to also work in the North American version of Personal Trainer: Walking, it does not have any known connectivity with North American Wii games or apps.

The connectivity would almost certainly have been used to transfer walk measurements from Personal Trainer: Walking's included pedometers (Officially called Activity Meter), through the Nintendo DS game (whether using a Nintendo DS or potentially a Nintendo 3DS), and onwards to Wii Fit Body Check Channel on the Wii. Nintendo would later revisit walk data connectivity in Wii Fit U (The Fit Meter, which uses the same hardware as the Pokéwalker)

The video about the cheat code being discovered and how (Many of the details being in the video's description), although the video uploader had already applied the cheat code prior to recording the video.

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

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