Easy Blood Pressure Monitoring at Home

*This post is sponsored by the Ozeri CardioTech Digital Blood Pressure Monitor.I was provided with the product to review. All opinions are my own.

Temperature, heart rate, oxygen saturation and blood pressure are four "vitals" doctors and nurses like to get readings of on their patients.

ALL.THE.TIME. There is a reason people say hospitals are no place to get rest. After spending more time than I care to in hospitals with my husband, I can attest to the fact that doctors find it necessary to monitor these vitals around the clock.

My husband is on dialysis and his BP is checked every so often throughout every four hour treatment, three times a week. It also behooves us to have some sort of blood pressure monitor at home.

Maintaining level BP levels when you're on dialysis can be pretty tricky. My husband often deals with low blood pressure immediately after treatment. And then it can be high on an off-dialysis day.

I have never really trusted blood pressure cuffs you can buy for yourself to use at home. We've had manual and digital. I think I've most trusted the manual ones, oddly enough.

However, this new monitor I was sent is pretty cool.

Here are the product's main bullet points:

• New intelligent voice-guided feature alerts you to the proper positioning of your wrist for accurate blood pressure measurements.
• Automatically provides an audible hypertension assessment via a new talking function (as well as a display on the LCD screen).
• Portable, accurate, and simple-to-use with clinically proven technology, stores 180 blood pressure readings (90 x 2 users) with date and time recordings.
• Automatic Irregular heartbeat (Arrhythmia) detection and Hypertension Indicator.
• Push-button access to average blood pressure readings based on all readings in memory, AM versus PM readings, or the 3 most recent readings.

What I/we like about it:

• It's small, completely contained in the device itself. No arm cuff or need to be connected to something else.
• Comes with a handy-dandy hard protective storage box.
• It takes your BP on your wrist rather than your upper arm. I love this because it doesn't hurt or cut off circulation so much that my arm throbs and my hand tingles. (Yes, I tried it myself. I didn't make Hubs be the only guinea pig.)
• It TALKS, guiding you through the process of taking your blood pressure. Now, my husband would like the option of being able to turn that feature off, but as a visually impaired person, I find it quite helpful. Also, the voice feature makes doing something like this, which isn't fun by any means, and you may be doing when you don't feel well, a no-brainer.

I had my husband take the monitor to his dialysis clinic with him to test its accuracy against their blood pressure cuffs. He reported that the readings were pretty much the same.

Would I recommend the Ozeri CardioTech Digital Blood Pressure Monitor?

Yes, I would. I think it's a very helpful product for people like us who need it. (Um, otherwise I wouldn't have written this post, thankyouverymuch!)