Your Watch Will One Day Track Blood Pressure

Your smartwatch can track a lot of things, but at least for now, it can’t keep an accurate eye on your blood pressure. Last week researchers from University of Texas at Austin showed a way you smartwatch someday could. They were able to discern blood pressure by reflecting radio signals off a person’s wrist, and they plan to integrate the electronics that did it into a smartwatch in a couple of years.Beside the tried-and-true blood pressure cuff, researchers in general have found several new ways to monitor blood pressure using pasted-on ultrasound transducers, electrocardiogram sensors, bioimpedance measurements, photoplethysmography, and combinations of these measurements.“We found that existing methods all face limitations,” Yiming Han, a doctoral candidate in the lab of Yaoyao Jia told engineers at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) last week in San Francisco. For example, ultrasound sensing requires long-term contact with the skin. And as cool