Also for non-athletes

New and useful: when the watch measures blood pressure

Using the smartwatch in the fight against hypertension.

(Bild: Prostock-studio/stock.adobe.com)

For years, athletes have been using fitness trackers to monitor their cardiovascular stress during training. Now sick and healthy non-athletes are also increasingly buying such smartwatches so that they can monitor their cardiovascular performance. New on the market are smartwatches that measure blood pressure.

Increasingly, healthy and sick non-athletes are also buying smartwatches to monitor their cardiovascular performance. Since these small technical wonders also measure and document ECG, oxygen saturation, sleeping habits, temperature and blood pressure in addition to pulse and training distance, vague medical assumptions are being replaced by many concrete self-measurements.

Many values are more precise
New on the market are smartwatches that measure many blood pressure parameters on a daily basis. This describes hypertension much more precisely than a few values. Moreover, the process does not have to be actively triggered. No stress during the blood pressure measurement.

Measurements are not directly comparable
The dilemma: the measurements are not 1:1 comparable. Cuff measurements evaluate hearing phenomena or calculate blood pressure from pressure fluctuations. Those on the watch evaluate and calculate optically scanned pressure curves, taking into account other, sometimes unknown, assumptions. In addition, individual blood pressure measurements are difficult to repeat, regardless of the method used. A comparison of individual measurements that are not absolutely identical is therefore of little value. To assess the agreement, the distributions of many values must be compared.

A valuable addition to classic measurements
The smartwatch should therefore not be used as an alternative, but as a valuable addition to cuff measurement: The conventional cuff measurement remains the standard of comparison. The values are documented using an app (e.g. "Blutdruck-sms", available from the Appstore), which calculates the average value. The blood pressure monitor with the cuffless measurement is also installed and measures continuously.

The mean values of at least 30 cuff measurements and the mean value of the cuffless measurements from the same time period should not differ by more than 8 mmHg, as experts report. If the differences are greater, the watch measurement should be corrected for the cuff measurement.

A breath of fresh air in treatment
The additional use of cuffless measurement is pioneering work and helpful if the mean values agree.