The Apple Watch is a powerful wearable device that alarms you when you receive a text message or a calendar, providing increasingly important health readings to help you monitor your blood oxygen levels by telling you if your heart rate is unusually high or low)..
Now, a new patent suggests that Apple is advancing, and fast, to a new goal: blood-pressure monitoring.
Following on from two continuation patents granted a week ago, a major patent has now been granted that takes things much further. As reported by the meticulous Patently Apple, the new patent offers the possibility of greater accuracy in blood-pressure measurements, something that is notoriously difficult to manage on a single, wrist-borne device. Samsung’s attempts, for example, have required regular and frequent calibration by using a standalone blood pressure cuff.
As the patent begins: “The present disclosure typically concerns the measurement of blood pressure. Methods and instruments are given to calculate an average arterial pressure and/or to track changes in the user’s blood pressure in some modes. One or more pressure meters may be modified with one or more correction variables for the blood pressure assessment. The use of one or more corrective factors that have been revealed will make the measuring instruments and methods more portable, comfortable, and/or precise. In particular, bracelets that are less cumbersome than existing instruments that can help to control blood pressure more regularly and reliably can be given.”
There is no question about the significance of monitoring blood pressure: a visit to the doctor can be informative, as patients may become frightened, which results in an unwanted one-off reading. Therefore, it is much easier to provide a system that can control blood pressure for a prolonged time repeatedly. And what is your tech piece all day long? Okay, smartwatch. That’s right.
The patent goes on A wrist-worn unit comprised of an appliance house; one or more strips coupled with the appliance house; a single or more strip with a multitude of band settings to match in a variety of wrist sizes; and one or more strips comprising of one or more strip configuration sensors producing band configuration output which indicates the plurality of band configurations; the processor is designed to process the configuration performance of the band, to detect the real configuration of 1 or more of the bands; to compare the existing configuration of the one or more bands with the circumférence of the wrist; to measure the blood
pressure value using the pressure signal from the sensor and a correction factor based on the circumference of the wrist”.
Everything that is like this. The interesting truth is that several bands can be used with pressurized sensors or even other technology absolutely. As stated later in the patent, “an ultrasound transducer designed to calculate a target artery depth may include this. When measuring blood pressure levels, the processor can be paired with the ultrasonic transducer and calibrated to the target artery profile factor.”
In other words, Apple is designed to build a non-invasive blood pressure monitoring device that is easy to use and which offers correction information to ensure high precision.
