Scientists have developed a simple, low-cost clip that uses a smartphone’s camera and flash to monitor blood pressure at the user’s fingertip. The clip developed by researchers at the University of California (UC) San Diego, US, works with a custom smartphone app and currently costs about 80 cents (5.6 rupees) to make.
The researchers estimate that the cost could be as low as 10 cents (0.7 rupees) apiece when manufactured at scale.
The technology, described in the journal Scientific Reports, could help make regular blood pressure monitoring easy, affordable and accessible to people in resource-poor communities, they said. It could benefit older adults and pregnant women, for example, in managing conditions such as hypertension, according to the researchers.
“We have created an inexpensive solution to lower the barrier to blood pressure monitoring,” said study first author Yinan Xuan, a Ph.D. student at UC San Diego. “Because of their low cost, these clips could be handed out to anyone who needs them but cannot go to a clinic regularly,” said study senior author Edward Wang, a professor at UC San Diego and director of the Digital Health Lab.
Another key advantage of the clip is that it does not need to be calibrated to a cuff, the researchers said. “This is what distinguishes our device from other blood pressure monitors,” said Wang.
Other cuffless systems being developed for smartwatches and smartphones, he explained, require obtaining a separate set of measurements with a cuff so that their models can be tuned to fit these measurements.
“Our is a calibration-free system, meaning you can just use our device without touching another blood pressure monitor to get a trustworthy blood pressure reading,” Wang said.
To measure blood pressure, the user simply presses on the clip with a fingertip. A custom smartphone app guides the user on how hard and long to press during the measurement. Source: PTI