WASHINGTON: A new study has claimed Millions of people could be trying untested, inaccurate and potentially dangerous smartphone applications, or apps, to measure their blood pressure.
Researchers analyzed the top 107 apps for ‘hypertension’ and ‘high blood pressure’ that are available for download on the Google Play store and Apple iTunes and found that nearly three-quarters offered tools for tracking medical data.
But they also found seven Android apps that claimed users needed only to press their fingers onto phone screens or cameras to get blood-pressure readings – claims that scientists say are bogus.
Lead author of research, Dr. Nilay Kumar’ This technology is really in its nascent stages, and it’s not quite ready for prime time,’
Kumar, an attending physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Harvard Medical School instructor, was surprised to learn that apps marketed as turning smartphones into blood pressure measuring devices had been downloaded at least 900,000 times and as many as 2.4 million times.
‘That’s concerning that such a small number of apps have been downloaded so many times,’ he said. ‘We were surprised by the popularity.’
He wasn’t sure how the technology supposedly works but said the phone camera appears to read a finger pulse.
‘It’s really in a research-and-development stage.
‘It’s not ready for clinical use. For now, we need to be careful that we are not using things that are inaccurate and could be potentially dangerous,’ he said.
Apps that inaccurately measure blood pressure could lead to false alarms and possibly fatal false assurances, Kumar said.
A growing number of hypertension patients use mobile-health technologies to track and manage their conditions, the authors write in the Journal of the American Society of Hypertension.
But healthcare agencies, such as universities, helped develop only a tiny fraction of the apps, 2.8 percent, the study found.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates medical devices, has not approved any of the blood pressure apps, the authors write.
The study’s findings raise ‘serious concerns about patient safety’ and reveal an ‘urgent need for greater regulation and oversight in medical app development,’ the authors say.
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