PulseOn, a new wearable technology startup based in Finland, is betting that its heart-rate monitor will become the go-to tool for health tracking.
During Tero Mennader's five-year stint at Nokia, he worked on developing a piece of now-patented technology for incredibly accurate, "beat-to-beat" heart rate measurement.
Just last year, Mennader spun out the idea from Nokia to create PulseOn.
PulseOn is a heart rate monitor that you wear on your wrist, as opposed to strapped around your chest.
The most common type of heart rate monitor is the chest strap model, which can be rather expensive and quite chunky to wear. Another common, but less effective type, is the finger sensor models. In most cases with the finger sensor models, you have to stop your exercise in order to take a measurement.
With PulseOn, it's continuously measuring your heart rate, and you don't need a chest strap. The first use case, Mennader tells Business Insider, will be for sports and fitness.
During the night, PulseOn measures your physical recovery. For athletes, PulseOn will tell them if it's worthwhile to train really hard, do some recovery training, or just completely relax the next day.
A few months later, PulseOn will launch tools for measuring stress and sleep impact, meaning that you would actually be able to find out how well you recovered from the day prior.
"If you drink alcohol before you go to sleep, wake up in morning, a motion-based activity tracker (like the Fitbit or Fuelband) will tell you you've been sleeping long and well, even though you haven't," Mennader says. "PulseOn will tell you you've been sleeping a while, but your body hasn't really recovered."
It recently raised €1 million to finalize its production and enter markets during the first half of next year.
Wearable tech is already a $3- to $5 billion market, according to a May report by Credit Suisse. In the next two to three years, it could skyrocket to $30- to $50 billion.
While the wearable tech market is growing, and has seen a lot of new entrants in the past year, Mennader is confident that PulseOn will be the most accurate activity tracker out there.
SEE ALSO: Thanks To Apple And Google, Wearable Technology Is On Track To Become A $50 Billion Market