Monitor Your Blood Pressure with iHealth

We use our iPhones for games, email, procrastinating, texting, and web browsing (and sometimes making phone calls, I guess). But iHealth wants your iPhone to do more still. Instead of an all-around awesome entertainment and productivity machine, what if your iPhone could help you manage your health, too?

Of course, we've seen weight loss apps and blood pressure logs before. But iHealth's new Blood Pressure Monitoring System is different: it couples a handy app with the actual hardware.

Available soon in the iHealth Blood Pressure Monitoring System is comprised of a blood pressure arm cuff and a portable, battery-powered dock which doubles as a charging station. Fire up the accompanying app, and testing your blood pressure becomes an easy matter. Not only will the app give you a reading, but it also stores the information so that you can later view your daily blood pressure history. This allows you to track your blood pressure over time as well as graph the data. You can also share the data with a family member or doctor.

What's great about this is that monitoring your blood pressure at home correlates to having it under control, and therefore better health: a recent report found that those who monitored at home were 50 percent more likely to have their blood pressure under control. From iHealth's press release:

"Regularly monitoring blood pressure in a relaxed consistent setting gives users the most reliable information on the status of their cardiovascular health," said Dr. Andrew Brandeis, a practicing physician at Care Practice in San Francisco. "More important, iHealth—for the first time—reveals trends and fluctuations in the data and enables the user to easily share the information using their iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, which encourages and reinforces lifestyle changes in real time."

The iHealth Blood Pressure Monitoring System will be on sale for $99.95 at iHealth99.com soon. The way I see it, iHealth is one of many examples of how the iPhone is far more than just another smartphone—it can do some really amazing stuff, with real results. Who would've thought we'd ever be able to conduct a blood pressure test on our cellphone? This is more than another "cool app" like Smule's long-since-released Ocarina; iHealth actually has the potential to improve lives.