Omron Wrist Blood Pressure Monitor Review
What`s all the fuss about the Omron wrist blood pressure monitor? The brand name is an indicator! Omron have been designing medical devices for 75 years, and are leaders in the field of innovative advanced technology. To date they have sold more than 70 million monitors worldwide. There is always some new development to help take the mystery and complications out of home monitoring.
Omron Healthcare Group was the first company to develop and introduce manual and digital high blood pressure monitors into the home healthcare market after they were introduced into the healthcare field in 1978.
Omron`s Track Record
The Omron wrist blood pressure monitor HEM-637 was the first wrist monitor to be recommended by the British Hypertension Society.
In Japan the first wrist automatic monitor to enable users to view over 7 days readings on a graph was the Omron HEM-637 model.
Omron was the first to produce upper arm and wrist monitors that could detect morning hypertension with the HEM-670 wrist model.
A monitor that detects morning hypertension serves as a protection, because from the time it takes a patient to rise in the morning, get dressed, eat breakfast and then take the trip to see his doctor, their blood pressure will have changed. Morning hypertension can be detected if the patient monitors early enough, and this could save a person from cardiovascular events and stroke which have been connected with morning hypertension.
Omron certainly has a good tract record for producing accurate and highly functional monitors.
So which models on offer will perform the best?
Positioning Very Important
For an Omron wrist blood pressure monitor or any brand of wrist monitor to be accurate, the position of your arm is very important, yet many people get this wrong, hence the bad reputation that wrist monitors have been labelled with. Omron has devised the Omron R7, and HEM-670-IT with a build-in sensory gadget that indicates if your arm is too high or too low. It literally thinks for you! I would say this is in the top 3 of necessary features of a good monitor for an accurate reading. The other 2 being the brand and protocol validation.
Blood Pressure Monitor Review
After sifting through all models of Omron wrist blood pressure monitors, the two that came up tops are the Omron R7 in the UK and the HEM 670 IT in the US.
Best Home Blood Pressure Monitor – All Types US
Note the Quote!
“The development of products to identify morning hypertension underscores Omron Healthcare’s dedication to empowering people to detect and prevent illnesses and conditions before it’s too late to notify a physician. Our aim is to help both doctors and patients by providing an at-home solution to help detect not only hypertension, but now morning hypertension as well.” – Isao Ogino – Chief Executive Officer of Omron Healthcare.
Wrist devices are subject to errors that are not presently evaluated in the available validation protocols. The most important source of error with wrist devices is the position of the arm in relation to the heart. A wrist device may fulfill the accuracy criteria of a validation protocol when strict attention is paid to having the wrist at heart level but in home use this may not happen and as a consequence the measurements can become inaccurate. For this reason validated upper arm devices are recommended in preference to wrist devices. – British Hypertension Society
When is the best time to take your blood pressure? Before you get up out of bed in the morning, before you take tea, or breakfast or even before you dress, you should take your pressure. If you smoke, try to give up. And until then do not smoke before you take you blood pressure.
Your doctor may require extra monitoring throughout the day. If so, he will advise you, but normally the morning reading will be sufficient. Try and monitor at the same time each morning, and doing it every morning will help you get into a routine so you are less likely to forget.