PulseOn has yet another wearable health monitor. But it wants to set itself apart by making sure it has the most accurate measurement of your heart rate.
Above: Tero Mennander of PulseOn
The company has focused from the start on proprietary algorithms that capture your heartbeats, Tero Mennander, chief executive of Helsinki-based PulseOn, said in a press briefing at the Slush 2014 conference.
“We have accurate and reliable optical heart-rate technology that we have been optimizing for the last four years,” Mennander said. “We offer continuous heart-rate measurement.”
PulseOn uses a patented optical sensor that includes different wavelengths of light. That light illuminates your skin at different depths to detect the tiny modulations of light intensity caused by the flow of blood. From that, it figures out the heart rate. The algorithms reject disturbances caused by movement.
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Above: PulseOn
Mennander said the data is as accurate as that provided by a medical chest strap and that the company wants to tell you what your heart rate means.
He said the technology will tell you the intensity of your training and its effect on your fitness. The battery lasts about 10 hours for sports activity and three days if you are idle.
From your pulse, the company says it can calculate your calories burned, sleep quality, and the time it will take for
you to recover from physical activity.
If you run a long race, for instance, it will tell you the number of hours it will take you to fully recover.
Other companies like Samsung, Basis Science (owned by Apple), and the makers of heart-monitoring chest straps are rivals. But chest straps aren’t really wearable, and Mennander said that others get a lot of data from a bunch of sensors but that if the quality of that data isn’t good, the collective analysis of that data will also be poor quality.
“Garbage in, garbage out,” he said.
Over time, the company wants to be able to measure everything related to fitness, sleep, and stress levels.
The company was founded in 2012 and has 15 employees. It launched its device in October.
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