In article ,
"Dave W" writes:

"Brian Reay" wrote in message
news

As an aside, I happened to meet someone involved in the design of a new
type of BP meter. He told me the 'cuff type' was generally accepted to be

I was in a trial for a new type developed by UCL.
You wear it like a large watch and it senses at your wrist, but
it measures the blood pressure at your aorta somehow, not at the
sense site. The challenge with measuring blood pressure is always
to get it as near to the heart as possible - the further away, the
less accurate (which is why wrist measurements are nowhere near as
good as upper arm measurements).

The prototype didn't work on me - you needed more fat in your wrists.
That was nevertheless useful feedback for the trial program.

potentially wildly inaccurate - there are too many things in the basic set
up which are not controlled- eg initial cuff fit, the point where the user
detects the 'change' (I can't recall the correct term he used), ......
While I accept he had reasons to criticise the 'old' approach (he was
working on the replacement), he knew I wasn't a customer and his points
did make engineering sense. He didn't share details of the replacement,
other than it worked by sensing flow as far as I could tell.

I can confirm that. I was discovered to have high blood pressure while in
hospital for something else. I always wonder if a given cuff will give
accurate results for both fat and skinny arms. Lidl had a recent offer of
a wrist-cuff meter for only £10 which I bought, but I found that the
readings
varied erratically from one to the next. When plotted on a graph my
average systolic is 140 which is "good" (compared with the doctors'
arm-cuff readings of over 180) but the peaks and troughs were about plus and
minus 40 on that, so I gave up using it.

Yes, they tried reading my blood pressure just before shoving a
camera up where the sun don't shine. Strangley, it was alarmingly
high. Measuring again afterwards found it was normal. They found
this surprising for some reason - I didn't.

--
Andrew Gabriel
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