[HN Gopher] New devices could change the way we measure blood pr...
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New devices could change the way we measure blood pressure
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 26 points
Date : 2023-10-27 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (knowablemagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (knowablemagazine.org)
| cratermoon wrote:
| The way tech companies are today, no matter how groundbreaking
| and excellent the monitoring technology, the UI will completely
| fail on the accessibility needs of the biggest audience: adults
| 50+
| johngossman wrote:
| I'm guessing you've had many of the same experiences I have of
| trying to help elderly parents. The tech industry is way too
| focused on young people and cool design.
| foobiekr wrote:
| 50+ includes half of GenX, many of which are more sophisticated
| technologically than their successors.
|
| 60+, yeah.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Being able to check blood pressure via my phone sounds terrible
| for hypochondriacs like me.
| netcraft wrote:
| I think I feel the same way. I would absolutely love to be able
| to look at a graph of my blood pressure over time, but it would
| probably be terrible if I could see it realtime on my wrist.
| johngossman wrote:
| I'd like a daily average, which is pretty much what my doctor
| asks me for and I only have a couple of data points every day
| (at most).
| swatcoder wrote:
| For me, the constant stream of other health data shattered my
| willful ignorance.
|
| For as much as I would worry, the data kept insisting I was
| stubbornly healthy and that when I did feel poorly, it was
| almost always attributable to something specific I'd done
| recently. It made it very hard to maintain the anxieties I'd
| spent decades culturing, so I eventually just gave in and
| accepted that I was pretty darn fine and had some specific bad
| habits that had been surreptitiously fueling the anxieties.
|
| So while more data might make things worse for you, that
| experience is not universal.
| jmann99999 wrote:
| I would love to track my hypertension with an always-on device.
| The cuff measurements are very point in time. If the device was
| measuring almost constantly, then I could see which of my
| behaviors positively and negatively impacted my blood pressure.
|
| I hope these alternative methods are viable.
| reneherse wrote:
| Hoping this will be an Apple watch feature soon
| loughnane wrote:
| There are a few devices that are cleared for cufflessly measuring
| bp, but that's only been in the past few years.
|
| Anything worn on the wrist is going to be sensitive to noise
| either from motion or from varying amounts of light getting to
| the ppg sensor.
|
| It's not a game changer yet. Partly because of those problems,
| partly because there aren't established norms for what to do with
| more bp data.
|
| All that's getting better though, I think it'll make a difference
| in the next 5-10y.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm sure it varies a lot during the day. Have you had your
| coffee and how much? Have you taken your BP medication yet?
| Have you exercised? Did you just have a really annoying phone
| call?
|
| Some of those real-time results might be interesting. Maybe you
| could cut back on the coffee a little. But there's also a
| natural variance because life over the course of a day or weeks
| that many of us would just as soon ignore and instead prefer to
| monitor accurately over comparatively long time intervals
| (week+) with at least an attempt to measure under comparable
| conditions. (And even then I find a fair bit of variance.)
|
| That's a general issue I have with "quantified self" info. It's
| either something I know. (I didn't sleep well last night for
| whatever reason or I was at a desk or in a plane seat all day.)
| Or it's something I mostly can't or won't do much about.
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(page generated 2023-10-27 23:00 UTC)