The Audar E2 has provided the average consumer with an insight into health tech innovation, but for some the leap in technology can be overwhelming.
In particular, some wearers might not understand the idea of Blood Pressure Monitor calibration.
It's quite a simple idea, but it can get lost under jargon and other features, so read on to learn all you need to know about using a wearable Blood Pressure monitor.
What is a Blood Pressure Monitor?
Blood pressure is most ordinarily measured with a Blood Pressure Cuff. This is the most popular type of Blood Pressure monitor, but what you might not know is that there are others.
Cuffs are medical-grade and by far the most accurate, but require you have specialist equipment, applied correctly, and take quite a lot of time to use routinely (Not to mention they can do a number on your arm when they get properly tight!).
An alternative monitor uses contact and light sensors instead of a cuff. This solution can provide Blood Pressure estimates and trends, without having to use a cuff every hour of every day.
These are the two main types of Blood Pressure Monitor.
Why Do You Need to Calibrate a Blood Pressure Monitor?
Blood pressure cuffs are medical-grade and are assumed to be accurate. However, other monitors that measure more frequently, but less intrusively, can lose that reliability. What you gain in flexibility and ease-of-use, you might lose in accuracy.
However, Blood Pressure calibration is the solution the Audar E2, for example, implements.
By giving the wearable monitor access to your latest official Blood Pressure reading from a cuff, you can set a boundary and expectation for the wearable. By using your accurate cuff reading, the wearable version can more accurately identify outliers and notice trends.
How To Calibrate a Monitor
To begin this calibration you need to take a measurement with a medica-grade Blood Pressure cuff, preferably once every two weeks,
After each measurement, you input the value on the "Calibration" section of the dashboard in the case of E2 (or however your device receives this information).
Now, you can forget about it for another two weeks!
Simply update the calibration value every two weeks or so, to ensure accuracy and reliability stay as high as possible for your blood pressure monitor to use at home.
Where to Buy Blood Pressure Monitors
You can find supply of blood pressure cuffs and also refer to your doctor for medical-grade measurements. However, wearable solutions are still the cutting-edge of consumer health technology.
The Audar E2 is the only commercially available health watch for Blood Pressure which uses an embedded IoT SIM card, and supports calibration for added blood pressure reliability.
You can read more about E2 in our other health tech blogs, as well as on it's page here.
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