| Title | Wearable 'Watches' to Monitor Your Blood Pressure | |
| Date | Tuesday January 31 2017, @05:13AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the pocket-watches? dept. | ||
What if there were a wearable fitness device that could monitor your blood pressure continuously, 24 hours a day?
Unfortunately, blood pressure (BP) measurements currently require the use of a cuff that temporarily stops blood flow. So a wearable BP "watch" using today's technology would squeeze your wrist every few minutes, making it impracticable to use – not to mention annoying.
A better method might gauge subtle pressure changes at the surface of your skin above one of the main wrist arteries – the radial artery – without regularly cutting off your circulation. But before scientists can create this new technology, they need to understand what the pressure inside a blood vessel "looks" like on the surface of the skin. And to do that, they must make a physical model that can be used to test wearable devices in a laboratory.
NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) is currently collaborating with Tufts University's School of Medicine to develop just such a model, a blood pressure wrist "phantom" – essentially a fake arm that mimics the mechanical properties of blood pulsing through an artery surrounded by human tissue.
All watches are not wearable?
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printed from SoylentNews, Wearable 'Watches' to Monitor Your Blood Pressure on 2025-12-14 03:54:25