Man develops app to help manage high blood pressure

After being diagnosed with high blood pressure in 2016, Cameron was told by the doctor to reduce his salt intake. However, Cameron knew he already had a low-salt diet and felt lost about what factors in his daily habits were mainly contributing to the elevated blood pressure.

As he was informed, high blood pressure increases the risk strokes and heart attacks, so it was a priority for him to find a way to adapt his lifestyle in order to decrease his blood pressure.

That is when Cameron decided to start recording his daily blood pressure results and mapping them against different factors such as level of stress, sleep quality, salt intake and physical activity. After one month, he put all the data in one graph, and it became clear that stress and lack of sleep were the factors that mainly related to his high blood pressure. So, he worked on these two variants and, within a month, his blood pressure had returned to a healthy range.

Cameron wanted other people to also benefit from his invention, so he created BP Owl, an app that allows users to monitor their own blood pressure and lifestyle, and easily figure out which aspects of their daily life are causing blood pressure to spike. This then allows the user to focus on changing those specific factors.

‘I was confident that if I got enough data I’d have a good chance of discovering what was behind it though and within a month of daily recording I was able to pull a graph that showed clearly how my blood pressure spiked on days where I’d reported having a poor sleep and feeling particularly stressed’, Cameron said.

BP Owl is user-friendly. The user only needs to record what he has done and how he feels for 30 days, after which the app will show the results about which factors are causing high blood pressure. ‘Within 30 days you’ll have a definitive answer for what is causing your high blood pressure and can take steps to address it,’ he said. ‘Our goal is to help people take their health into their own hands. We want to give people the tools they need to beat high blood pressure naturally.’

Dr Lutz Kraushaar, from Bielefeld University in Germany, said that ‘BP Owl is a big step towards personalized preventive medicine, something which doctors don’t currently have the capacity to provide’.

BP Owl is available on the App Store and Google Play for free.

Adapted from: http://bit.ly/33ZLZaQ

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