In the recent days the wearable industry is blowing up, People use their wearables to track their workouts, check their Heart Rate and much more. UnitedHealthcare and Qualcomm Life, have integrated wearable devices from Samsung and Garmin International into UnitedHealthcare Motion.
This is quite noteworthy because the primary wearable player in the wellness space was Fitbit, which has more than 1,300 enterprise customers. As more players like Samsung, have entered the market with great devices, Health Care partners have added more Wearable manufactures.
These devices have to be integrated and validated with Qualcomm Life’s 2net platform for medical-grade connectivity, these include The Samsung Gear Fit2 Pro, Gear Sport, and the Garmin vívosmart 3.
Qualcomm Life
Qualcomm Life, a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm. They leverage their connectivity expertise to provide secure data transfer from the devices, to the Motion app and to UnitedHealthcare. Qualcomm Life also allows the integration of more activity trackers into the 2net Platform and UnitedHealthcare Motion.
UnitedHealthcare Motion
UnitedHealth Group Inc. is an American profit managed health care company based in Minnetonka, Minnesota. Their ‘UnitedHealthcare Motion’ is wellness program in the US. This program will provide the participants with Fitness Trackers with no additional charge, In addition to that, the participants can also earn more than $ 1000 USD per year by completing certain walking goals. The participants can earn up to $4 per day by achieving these F.I.T. goals:
- Frequency: complete 500 steps within seven minutes six times per day, at least an hour apart;
- Intensity: complete 3,000 steps within 30 minutes; and
- Tenacity: complete 10,000 total steps each day.
Since the beginning of this program, participants have collectively walked more than 130 billion steps and earned more than $19 million in rewards.
“The enhancements to UnitedHealthcare Motion enable the program to offer companies and their employees more digital health and wellness resources that are personalized, connected and intuitive, We are expanding the portfolio of available devices to make UnitedHealthcare Motion more flexible, convenient and consumer friendly,” said Sam Ho, M.D., chief medical officer of UnitedHealthcare.
This program is available to all the US-based employers through the UnitedHealthCare’s insurance plans. Employers are expected to incorporate more than 13 million wearable and fitness tracking devices into their wellness programs by 2018.
“Our motivation for implementing this program was simple: creating a happier and healthier workforce, We recognize that wearable devices can help reduce our company’s overall health care costs and engage employees in our wellness program, enabling them to track their daily activity levels and improve their health and well-being,” said Thomas Williams, director of finance of Wayne Densch, a Florida-based company that adopted the program in 2016.
A related study published in Science & Medicine showed people tend to overestimate how much exercise they get each week by more than 50 minutes, and they underestimate sedentary time by more than two hours. Thus showing the importance of a wellness program like UnitedHealthcare Motion.
