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Samsung's Blood Pressure Monitoring Feature Now Available

11 points by brandonb

by wolvoleo

0 subcomment

I've had this 'feature' for years. On the Samsung watch 6 and 7. But it's not really anything to write home about. The watch lacks any kind of direct pressure sensing, leading to nothing more than some extrapolations based on heartrate (and perhaps SpO2) and very recent calibrations with a real cuff. If you don't recalibrate regularly it just refuses to work.
It's really nothing more than a fancy guesstimate. Cool to look at, too unreliable for anything real.
If you really have any health concerns, use a cuff whenever you need to know. If you don't, you won't care about this feature anyway. A number is worthless if you can't count on it.
The ECG on the other hand, that's kinda cool. It's only one channel and it only looks for one kind of defect but at least it does that fairly reliably so, as long as you sit really still while measuring it to get a clean reading. It holds no candle to a real multichannel ecg but at least it actually measures something.

by hbcondo714

1 subcomments

> Requires a third-party blood pressure cuff (sold separately) for initial and periodic calibrations
So you still need a wear a sphygmomanometer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphygmomanometer