I’d always wanted a blood pressure monitor as part of my self tracking regimen, but honestly my blood pressure was always very good and most of the decent monitors seemed always to be in the $100 range.
Then my blood pressure started to rise into the pre-hypertension area on a couple of doctors visits, which didn’t make any sense, so I broke down and bought one so I could better track my blood pressure on a day-to-day basis.
After looking around Amazon, I settled on the Omron 7 Wrist Blood Pressure Monitor. The main advantage of the Omron 7 is that being a wrist monitor, it is very compact and portable — I can just toss it in the bottom of my backpack and take it with me anywhere if I wanted. Also, I really hate the sensation of traditional arm cuff blood pressure monitors.
I’ve tested it before and after doctor’s visits to see how well it compares to what the nurse tells me my blood pressure is, and so far it seems to be spot on accurate.
The unit will store the last 100 blood pressure readings each for two separate users (there is a slider that lets you switch between user 1 and user 2). It would be nice to have a USB or Bluetooth option to automatically copy the data, but I simply copy the readings onto a spreadsheet at the end of the week.
The nice thing is that I was able to use the unit to quickly determine why my blood pressure was slightly elevated. I sustained a knee injury and had been taking ibuprofen to deal with some of the lingering pain and inflammation. Using the Omron I was able to determine that my blood pressure was elevated in and around the times I was taking the pain killer, and returned to its normal levels when I ceased taking it. It was good to discover that the elevated blood pressure level wasn’t tied to any underlying health problem.