Going on sale in Japanese electronics shops today is Fujitsu’s Raku-raku (Easy-easy), a handset that includes all the usual features of a mobile phone, but with one crucial difference: it slows the caller’s voice down to a manageable pace. Its distributor, NTT DoCoMo, boasts that the device will make straining to hear a grandchild’s telephone jabbering a merciful thing of the past.By toggling a switch on the side of the phone, the Raku-raku instantly converts all incoming voices to 70 per cent of their usual speed, making the words much easier for the listener to make out. The effect is a little like playing a record at the wrong speed.

The technology works by slightly elongating the spoken words while “stealing” minute fractions of air time from the silences between them.

The combined effect of the slowed words does create short backlogs at the end of each sentence, but the phone will never allow the delay to extend further than one second. If the backlog does reach the one- second mark — and it takes a truly breathless, punctuation-free monologue to achieve that — the converter temporarily switches off to let the conversation catch up.

The Raku-raku, which costs about £130, is the latest weapon in a spiralling battle between Japan’s largest mobile phone companies for the ears and wallets of the country’s growing ranks of over-65s. With the fastest-ageing population in the developed world, Japan has recently begun thinking of its grey-haired masses as more than just an impending social security nightmare and started looking for ways to tap into their hoarded wealth.

The first shot in the grey mobile war was fired this year by DoCoMo’s nimble rival, Tu-Ka, which introduced a handset that was pared down to its barest essentials. Sales of the S-phone far exceeded expectations as young people rushed to buy the phones for ageing relatives.

“Obviously sales of the S-phone were strong because many elderly people liked the idea of a phone that was so easy to use,” a DoCoMo spokesman said. “But there is actually a very large proportion of phone users that we think of as ‘active seniors’ who want the functions of a top-of-the-range 3G phone but want it in a way that is easy to use. We did a survey of what older users don’t like about normal phones, and one of the top answers was that they can’t hear properly when young people are talking quickly at them.”

As well as having bigger keys and much louder speakers than a normal phone, Fujitsu’s new handset includes several other devices aimed at the more mature user. The phone contains a built-in pedometer to measure how far its owner has walked that day, and an 80-decibel panic alarm in case “they should fall over and need to attract attention”.

GADGETS FOR YOUR DOTAGE

• The I-Pot: a kettle with a telecoms link to nervous sons and daughters. It keeps water at perfect drinking temperature throughout the day and takes a note of every time its elderly user takes tea from it. If the user fails to get a cuppa every few hours, the kettle sends a text message to relatives
  
  
• The Sega/Nippon Care Supply Brain Trainer: a game console that helps its elderly owners to fight senile dementia by keeping them supplied with a constant stream of brain teasers, visual and mathematical puzzles
  
  
• The Tmsuk Stair robot: a two-legged robot with eight hydraulic pistons that can carry a person up a flight of stairs in its outstretched arms

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