Heart rate monitors have become a staple of athlete’s gym bags. Mio Global is taking heart rate monitor technology to a new level by creating monitors that can be worn on the wrist. The company founded by Liz Dickinson last month announced $15 million in Series B funding led by Hydra Ventures.
Mio plans to use the funding to further develop its AI-based sensor and analytics platform within Personal Activity Intelligence or PAI, a metric the company introduced to measure heart rate to monitor the body’s response to physical activities.
“The era of the heart rate has finally arrived,” Dickinson said in a statement. “Multiple wearables offer accessible, unobtrusive heart rate monitoring, yet most consumers do not fully agree with the heart rate sensing capabilities or do not know how to make sense of heart rate data. PAI solves this problem by using one simple metric that is far more meaningful and personalized than counting 10,000 steps. This new investment will be used to fuel continued growth and develop future technologies that will improve global health.”
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
Exercise physiologist Dr. Ulrik Wilsoff and the Head of Cardiac Exercise Research Group invented PAI. PAI technology gives personalized feedback to each user. Users can earn points in their day-to-day physical activities and the goal is to have 100 points or more over the course of a week.
In addition to PAI, Mio plans to use some of the money to launch Mio SLICE, a new line of wrist-based wearables that will capture 24-hour heart rate data and show PAI directly on a user’s wristband.
Mio Global became the first company to introduce continuous optical heart rate sensor in a sports wristwatch.