How to test your blood pressure on phone

Monitoring blood pressure is crucial for maintaining overall health and preventing serious medical conditions. However, to monitor it often, you might need to visit your doctor. Or else you might have to have the sphygmomanometer to check it at your convenience. But what if you can monitor blood pressure using your smartphone? Before diving into that, let’s take a look at why monitoring blood pressure is crucial.

Why is monitoring your blood pressure important?

Blood pressure is the strength with which the blood pushes on the sides of arteries as it's pumped around your body. Low blood pressure, also known as hypotension, happens when the pressure is low. Though it can cause dizziness and fainting in some people, it is not usually harmful. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, on the other hand, is problematic. Often, there are no noticeable signs of hypertension, and it can secretly damage the heart, arteries, kidneys, and other vital organs over time. Regular monitoring helps detect changes early, and also helps you to make timely interventions through lifestyle adjustments or medication. There is no debate that monitoring blood pressure is extremely essential for managing cardiovascular health.

Can you monitor your blood pressure using your smartphone?

This cannot be answered directly. There are multiple apps that claim to measure blood pressure using a smartphone’s camera, flash, or sensors, often relying on techniques like photoplethysmography (PPG) or pulse transit time (PTT). However, these methods are not medically validated. A 2016 study on the Instant Blood Pressure app found it had only 25-50% accuracy in detecting hypertension, potentially giving users false reassurance.

Good news!

However, in 2024, a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh developed an Android phone app that can remotely estimate pressure in a person's arteries as their heart squeezes. The app works by taking a variety of readings from the accelerometer, camera, and touch sensors built into modern smartphones.

Smartphones can't measure blood pressure like traditional cuffs that squeeze the arm. Instead, the app uses gravity and finger pressure on the screen to estimate pulse pressure. Its smart feature instead guides users to adjust hand positions and perform specific touches to get accurate readings.
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"Because of gravity, there's a hydrostatic pressure change in your thumb when you raise your hands up above your heart, and using the phone's accelerometer, you're able to convert that into the relative change in pressure," biomedical engineer Vishaal Dhamotharan from the University of Pittsburgh, said in a statement. The study is published in Scientific Reports.