Beneufit and MIO Global Partner to Provide Highly Accurate Wearable Technology to Chronic Disease Populations

Digital health company Beneufit and MIO Global announce a partnership providing accurate, comfortable and convenient wearable sensor technology to Parkinson’s disease patients.

San Francisco, California, November 09, 2015

Beneufit’s pdFIT™ iOS app works with MIO Global wearables to empower Parkinson’s disease patients to alter the course of their disease. The goal of the pdFIT™ program is to reduce symptoms, delay disease progression and improve quality of life by leveraging exercise. This is accomplished by prescribing specific exercise protocols designed for Parkinson’s disease patients and continuously monitoring patient health through a series of tests provided through the pdFIT™ app. Beneufit recently performed a pilot study where over a 12 week period their Parkinson’s disease population demonstrated a 25% improvement in manual dexterity and 38% improvement in fitness levels.*

The MIO Global partnership provides Beneufit's patients an alternative to cumbersome chest strap heart rate monitors which can be an impediment to disease management program compliance. The MIO suite of writs-borne heart rate monitors increases compliance because of their comfort and convenience.

“The determining factor for the partnership is the accuracy of MIO’s product line.” explained Beneufit CEO Jeff Broderick, “During treadmill tests their optical heart rate (OHR) technology tested plus or minus one beat per minute as compared to electrocardiography (EKG).”**

“While optical OHR has been used in hospitals for years, it hasn’t been suitable for active situations due to the disturbance of ‘noise’ generated by movement. With the help of our friends at Philips, we created a solution to cancel out the ‘noise’ caused by movement, by adding an accelerometer to the OHR sensor package. By doing this, we’ve redirected the movement data into an algorithm, which then gives out a clean heart rate signal in exercise scenarios.” explains MIO Global’s Chief Science Officer Mark Gorelick.

By marrying highly accurate and user-friendly wearable devices with chronic disease management services on mobile devices real progress in population health is possible.

About Beneufit, Inc. Beneufit's mission is to empower people to improve their medical condition through exercise, while supporting vital public health research in an open and ongoing fashion. More information is available at http://www.beneufit.com.

About Mio Global
Mio Continuous Technology can be found in all Mio products. This award-winning, patented technology reads EKG-accurate heart rate data at performance level speeds without the need for a chest strap. Our goal is to empower anyone to reach his or her goals with our innovated technology. Train with Heart! More information is available at http://www.mioglobal.com.

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*Beneufit, Inc., “2014 Parkinson’s Disease Pilot Study,”, November, 2014, Beneufit, Inc. web site, http://www.beneufit.com/content/beneufits-parkinsons-disease-pilot-study-2014, accessed Sept 27, 2015

** MIO Global, “MIO Heart Rate Accuracy vs EKG,”, April 30 2013, MIO Global web site, https://www.mioglobal.com/docs/sfsu_mio_ohr_accuracy_study.pdf, accessed November 3, 2015