Keep an eye on your blood pressure
Horst Klier's struggle with high blood pressure began in 2002 in his early 30s, when elevated blood pressure was discovered during a hospital stay. As an office worker the programmer had little muscle, was overweight and his doctor urged him to exercise and lose weight. That was supposed to bring his blood pressure under control at first without much success. That experience laid the groundwork for his later development of the "BloodPressureDB" app, which makes it quick and easy to record and analyze daily blood pressure measurements regardless of the blood pressure monitor or operating system.From spreadsheet to blood pressure app
Getting his blood pressure back to normal was Horst Klier's goal, first by changing his exercise and eating habits, later with medication. Whatever the treatment, regularly taking and documenting blood pressure readings is essential. As a working professional, Horst Klier found it very cumbersome to do three to four self-measurements a day, email them from the office to his home computer, and then enter them into an Excel spreadsheet in the evening. So he set up the website www.bloodpressuredb.com for his own use to enter his values there. Because the site was publicly accessible, he gradually received more and more requests from people who wanted to use it too. By mid-2009 the web solution was available to other users, and in 2011 the app version followed. Stefan Waller, an internist and cardiologist from Berlin who contributes to heart health with his digital education offering "Dr. Heart", considers the app a helpful daily companion for people with high blood pressure: "I greatly value the BloodPressureDB app and recommend it because of its clarity and intuitive, easy usability both on my website and to my patients in the practice. Patient feedback so far has been uniformly positive." The convincing part: BloodPressureDB is independent of monitor and operating system and synchronizes data across devices, from smartphone to tablet to computer. Device manufacturers also offer matching apps, sometimes with cloud sync; however, these are tied to the manufacturer and their devices.The newest feature in BloodPressureDB is the ability to transfer readings via Bluetooth. Horst Klier explains: "There are now blood pressure monitors that support the current Bluetooth standard for blood pressure data. This allows users to transfer their readings conveniently into the app without manual entry. The app automatically detects which readings are new and adds them to the overview." This also eliminates incorrect manual entries by users that could distort the analysis.
Horst Klier's offering is popular: more than 350,000 users have now registered with BloodPressureDB; the portal records about 700,000 uses per month. These are not just younger, smartphone-enthusiastic users, as you might expect. "I regularly get feedback from older people who use the application on their computer or tablet and especially appreciate the simple entry and the clear analysis," says Horst Klier. Practical: you can create statistics and graphs for doctor visits that show blood pressure trends at a glance basically a digital blood pressure record. And simplified documentation also motivates patients to keep doing self-measurements over the long term.
The number one health risk
Continuous monitoring of blood pressure is essential, because high blood pressure is the number one health risk in Germany. High blood pressure often shows no obvious symptoms at first, but the consequences can be severe. High blood pressure damages the inner protective layer of the arteries and accelerates arteriosclerosis. Gradually, high blood pressure causes changes in most organs, which can eventually lead to heart failure, heart attack, stroke, kidney failure and many other organ complications. "Two-thirds of untreated high blood pressure patients die from coronary heart disease or heart failure," warns Dr. Stefan Waller. "Forty percent of all strokes could be prevented by normalizing blood pressure."But when is blood pressure considered too high? Current guidelines from the European Society of Hypertension (ESH) and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) generally consider blood pressure below 140/90 mmHg to be normal. The average of several measurements should be about 5 mmHg below that. The causes of high blood pressure can be varied and are not necessarily due to organic disease. Four factors increase the risk of high blood pressure: too little exercise, an unhealthy diet, overweight and stress.
Expanding the app, reducing stress
For Horst Klier the tool he developed himself is a constant companion in everyday life and it will continue to be so in two ways: on the one hand, he is constantly working on new features and additions to the app. On the other hand, he is still working on his own blood pressure: despite losing more than 30 kg in 2014, his blood pressure remains borderline at just over 140 mmHg systolic and about 95 mmHg diastolic. "Reduce stress" is his doctor's instruction. As a self-employed person with five children that is not so easy. But Horst Klier is optimistic: "Kids do eventually grow up."
Characters: 5,106 / Keystrokes: 5,893
Images:
{graphic="email/bildrechtsohnetext" /}
Image 1: By developing his app, Horst Klier found a way to make regular self-monitoring of blood pressure easy to fit into everyday life.
{graphic="Infomail" /}
Image 2: "Horst's BloodPressureDB": With the personalized app each user gets clear reports over longer periods, for example.
Image 3: Exercise is part of it: to keep his blood pressure and his weight under control, Horst Klier does strength training in his home gym.
Downloads:
Contact BloodPressureDB:
Horst Klier
horst.klier@bloodpressuredb.com
klier.net GmbH & Co. KG
BloodPressureDB
Schwabach
Press:
Wiebke Reichardt
Tel.: +49 (0)911 / 598 398-0
Fax: +49 (0)911 / 598 398-18
w.reichardt@wassenberg-pr.de
Wassenberg Public Relations for Industry & Technology GmbH
Rollnerstr. 43
D-90408 Nuremberg
