I am excited to partner with Omron on this initiative.

I was recently given HeartGuide, the firs wearable blood pressure monitor, to wear for 2 weeks. Have you heard about this? It’s FDA-cleared and it’s new on the market. It’s a wearable blood pressure monitor that is a wristwatch and links to the Omron HeartAdvisor app that you download to your smartphone.

As a heart attack survivor and someone who used to have to check my blood pressure daily for weeks following my heart attack, I was excited to get this device and start monitoring my blood pressure again on a daily basis. I eagerly took it out of the box, downloaded the app, synced the device to my smartphone, and immediately tried it out! I have to say that I was hooked instantly.

The monitor is so quiet and unassuming. Over the 2 weeks that I wore HeartGuide, I took my blood pressure everywhere – in the airport, at work, in my car (it was parked), in bed, on my couch, in the waiting room of my Dr’s office, at a restaurant – and no one around me ever suspected a thing. I was obsessed. I took my blood pressure at LEAST twice a day but usually 3 or 4 times a day. If it seemed a little high for my liking, I would take it again a few minutes later after calming myself down and relaxing and the numbers would go down. It was great to see how the numbers fluctuated with different factors – sodium intake, activity, anxiety, relaxation, etc.

Every night before I went to bed, I would go into the app where there is a prompt that says “tell us about your day” and I would complete the super short questionnaire where you check off boxes and answer whether or not you took medication, drank fluids, exercised, etc. This helps the app determine trends in your blood pressure numbers over a period of time. A cool feature of the app is that it will give you daily insights. For instance, it told me that my blood pressure tends to be high on Tuesdays. So then I can go back and think about what I’m doing on Tuesdays that may cause my blood pressure to be higher on those particular days. I determined that it was probably because I have an acting class on Tuesday nights and I’m always very nervous during the day leading up to and through the class because you have to perform monologues and scenes in class. So it makes sense!

On one of the last nights that I was wearing the HeartGuide, I actually got an irregular heartbeat detected during my blood pressure reading. This happens when an irregular rhythm is detected 2 or more times during a blood pressure measurement. This really freaked me out, and I proceeded to take my blood pressure 6 more times that night to see if an irregular heartbeat was detected again, which it was not…thank goodness! But this is definitely something that I will want to share with my doctor since it is not normal for me to have an irregular heartbeat.

Did I mention that HeartGuide also monitors your sleep pattern (yes, I wore it to bed every night) and tracks your fitness? I set a goal for my daily steps and reached it almost everyday! Now you can see why I was so obsessed with HeartGuide!

If you want to learn more about HeartGuide and Omron’s Going for Zero pledge, visit their website: Omron Healthcare