It was only a matter of time until the first (usable) hardware attachments for the iPhone and iPad pop up to breach the gap between consumer goods and traditional medical devices. Now, two startups have entered this field at the same time. One of them already has a proven track record of manufacturing the geekyWithings scale – a scale that is hooked up with your Wi-Fi network and transmits your weight to wireless devices of your choice. While nerds around the world hooray for it, it will actually be interesting to see if anybody will ever conduct a good scientific study that measures the outcome over time (weight loss) compared to ordinary scales. The company behind it, Withings, now announced that they’ll soon be shipping their tensiometre.
iHealth, the other company that clearly is targeted towards Apple users, released the BP3, the “first ever, blood pressure monitoring system for iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad.”
Apart from being more beautiful than existing devices, the real benefit of these products lie in the detail. Data that is being collected (in this case blood pressure and pulse) is transmitted to the respective app and allows seemless integration with third party health data providers, such as Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault.
The iHealth BP3 costs $99,95 and can be bought here. The Withings tensiometre is not yet available.
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