Super Low-cost Smartphone Attachment Brings Blood Pressure Monitoring to Your Fingertips

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Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a simple, low-cost clip that uses a smartphone's camera and flash to monitor blood pressure at the user’s fingertip. The clip works with a custom smartphone app and currently costs about 80 cents to make. The researchers estimate that the cost could be as low as 10 cents apiece when manufactured at scale.

The technology was published May 29 in Scientific Reports.

Researchers say it could help make regular blood pressure monitoring easy, affordable and accessible to people in resource-poor communities. It could benefit older adults and pregnant women, for example, in managing conditions such as hypertension.

“We’ve created an inexpensive solution to lower the barrier to blood pressure monitoring,” said study first author Yinan (Tom) Xuan, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego.