Withings BPM Core: Smart Heart Health Management?

High blood pressure can kill. But thanks to Withings’ newest blood pressure monitor, BPM Core, managing your heart’s health just got a lot smarter—and it’s set to come out in the second quarter of 2019 for around $250.

Aside from detecting and monitoring high blood pressure, the BPM Core can use its sophisticated sensor cluster to identify atrial fibrillation and heart murmur. Traditional means of monitoring both conditions can take several minutes to accurately monitor. The extraordinary thing about the Core is that it can simultaneously run three different sensors in under a minute and a half, allowing many heart-disease patients to streamline their medical device portfolio and save precious minutes during each testing.

The Withings BPM Core may look like a standard blood pressure cuff, but the device has almost nothing in common with yesteryear’s blood pressure monitor; like the type you might see at a common drug store. Instead of only squeezing the arm to measure systolic and diastolic blood flow rates, the BPM Core combines a sophisticated sensor suite that reads not just your blood pressure but also heart rate—using the industry-leading electrocardiogram technology, which is far more accurate compared to light-emitting sensors (also known as photoplethysmography, or PPG).

The BPM Core offers two kinds of ways to display data. First, like many Blood Pressure wearables from manufacturers like Omron, it includes an LED display on the body of the cuff. Its second method of displaying data relies on the owner having either an iOS or Android device with Bluetooth connectivity.

In addition to ECG, heart-murmur, and blood pressure, Withings also threw in the ability to automatically notify medical assistance if it detects any serious medical emergency.

While all the details look amazing, the relatively high $250 price point makes the Withings BPM Core one of the more expensive heart-health monitors on the market. Especially compared to the competition. Manufacturers with a long history of product lines and device reliability, such as Omron, sell more affordable devices.

Withings, however, isn’t a newcomer to biometric-gathering devices, having entered the blood pressure market in 2014 with an FDA-approved wireless device. Its latest device may actually save the consumer money as it combines multiple devices into one and dramatically reduces testing time to a fraction of what the competitors can do.

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