Blood Pressure Companion App serves its purpose well. It is an "at your fingertips" organizer for tracking systolic and diastolic blood pressures along with heart rate and body weight.

High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a serious health condition increasing one's risk for stroke, heart attack, kidney failure, aneurysm, and other vascular damage. Being actively involved in one's own care by self-monitoring blood pressure provides powerful and useful information. Recording and managing the data can be a challenge for individuals and for caregivers, especially if you are collecting measurements from various machines in your home and community.

This app centralizes all the data, calculates Mean Arterial Pressure, allows various reports to be created, and can communicate the data to health care professionals. Each specific blood pressure measurement entry also includes the date, time of day, and a general note area. BP data that falls within a range of concern is highlighted and coded into cautionary yellow and risky red colors. The blank note area for each entry allows for individual flexibility for any information a user would want to add and document such as any physical symptoms, change in diet, level of stress, where the measurement was collected, which arm was cuffed, or any medication comments.

When trialed with an adult with cognitive challenges, he was excited to be able to use the talk-to-text microphone keyboard feature for this note area. Historical BP data was logged and a very useful report log was created showing his blood pressure pattern over time. When this log was exported via email to two different health care providers, they were pleased to have the extra data that was not collected from their clinic and commented that they were impressed with the level of self-involvement.

The ability to export blood pressure information is an excellent feature that easily connects the user to their health-care provider. The full version includes the option for iCloud backup and restore in addition to the wi-fi backup and restore capabilities of the free version. The free version of Blood Pressure Companion is a single profile app while the full version allows for multiple profiles making the app flexible and very useful for a caregiver to manage several family members BP data, including their own.