Speaker 1: I have high blood pressure and I've been interested in blood pressure wearables for years. I looked at Aron's Inflatable Cuff watch. I've looked at Standard Cuffs. I looked at sensors on smartwatches. Vail and Cell is a company that's made sensors that use optical heart rate for years, and they've been working for a while on trying to make a little blood pressure sensing device.
Speaker 1: What they've centered on is something that uses your finger, kind of similar to a pulse oximeter. It's a little [00:00:30] clip on monitor that's supposed to work without any calibration to a blood pressure monitor, and it takes a reading in about the same time that it takes to get an inflatable cuff measurement. So what's the difference? It's a lot smaller. This thing is so small that you could just, you know, tuck it in your pocket, put it in your bag. The technology is similar to a pulse oximeter in that it uses light that bounces off of your finger to measure for blood flow using a technology called PPG that gets interpreted with different algorithms here to [00:01:00] find out your blood pressure. What it does ask for is your weight and height to come up with something that helps the algorithm calibrate better to figure out what your blood pressure is.
Speaker 1: I took a reading in a very crowded CS in Las Vegas. Not an ideal situation for blood pressure. I'm dehydrated. I was wearing a mask, you know, I was feeling stressed. But once it took a measurement, which again took about 30 seconds, I got to see that. Lo and behold, blood blood pressure was high. Now I had no way of checking that against a blood pressure cuff, so I don't actually know how accurate it [00:01:30] is, but the claim is that it will be equivalent, although at very, very, very high blood pressures like we're talking really high blood pressures. According to Dr. Steven LaBuff who runs the company. You might run into some accuracy problems, but apparently if you did get that high, you'd still know you had high blood pressure, just not how high. Now, the idea of this type of a reader is not really meant to replace a blood pressure cuff. It's meant to kind of supplement it. So this product, which may cost about $99 is something that you carry around and measure more [00:02:00] frequently when it comes out. I'll be really curious to use it. It may let you know if you have high blood pressure, and for that alone it could be useful.
