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HEALTHCARE UNPLUGGED
Heart health with your handheld
By Dennis Crane
Statistics show that high blood pressure affects about 50 million, or one in four, American adults. It's a serious condition, which often has no symptoms. Once high blood pressure occurs, it usually lasts a lifetime. Physicians state that the only way to prevent high blood pressure is its permanent daily tracking. By analyzing the blood pressure trends, the doctor can prescript the cure. Thus, many people from all over the world have to measure their blood pressure several times a day and log it in order to show the statistics to their physicians. The majority of the hypertensive patients simply write down the readings in paper notebooks. Those who use personal computers log their readings in text files, spreadsheets, or databases.
All these methods are inconvenient in their own way. Several years ago, however, the handheld computer brought a simple yet powerful solution to the problem.
Nowadays, a PDA seems to be the perfect tool to keep track of your blood pressure. It's handy and allows for fast reading input. A tiny device is always with you no matter where you are--at home, in he hospital, or in the gym. After you have measured your blood pressure or pulse, it takes just a second to get out your Palm handheld and to enter the reading with a couple of stylus taps. You and your doctor can easily browse and analyze your tracking history.
The various charts show the blood pressure trends from different points of view. The auxiliary modules help to handle the summarized and averaged statistics quickly. And all these features fit in a tiny device that fits in your hand!
There's a pretty wide choice of specialized applications for Palm OS handheld computers that allow you to log, chart, print, and even email your blood pressure and pulse stats to your physician or nurse. Lets dig into that software pile to find the real pearls. The "blood pressure" searches on http://www.palmgear.com or http://www.handango.com return a dozen of titles. In this article, I'll analyze what I find to be the top seven programs.
Before I go on, it's time for a bit of disclosure: I work for UTrackSys.com; we produce one of the products listed below. Even though I've very proud of our software, there are quite a few excellent products out there and I think this is an important topic that needs to be covered. I'll do my best to be as objective as possible.
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