Watches, cuffless devices, and why nothing here connects to them
People ask why this site will not import readings from a smartwatch or pair with a Bluetooth cuff. There are two separate answers — one clinical, one about your data — and they happen to point the same way.
What the guideline says
“Reliance on cuffless devices, including smartwatches, for accurate blood pressure measurements should be avoided until these devices demonstrate greater precision and reliability.”
Note what that sentence does and does not say. It is about reliance on the readings, and it is explicitly conditional — “until these devices demonstrate greater precision and reliability.” It is a statement about the current state of a technology, not a permanent verdict on it, and a future guideline may well say something different. This site will follow whatever the guideline says at the time, and will say when it was last checked.
The second reason, which is about you rather than the device
Even if watch readings were perfectly accurate tomorrow, this site would still not import them, and the reason is worth being direct about.
A US regulation, 16 CFR 318.2, defines a “personal health record” as one with the technical capacity to draw information from multiple sources. The phrase that matters there is technical capacity: it is about what a product is able to do, not what any particular person does with it. The same section’s definition of health care services expressly includes tracking vital signs, and blood pressure is a vital sign.
Typing a reading in by hand is one source. Adding a watch, a health app, or a cuff that pairs over Bluetooth would supply a second — and would place this site inside a federal breach-notification regime even if not a single person ever used the feature. Building the capability is enough.
A site with no server, no account and no analytics can promise that your readings stay on your device and mean it. One that syncs from three places cannot make that promise as simply, whatever its intentions. So the answer to “can you add watch import?” is no, and it is not a roadmap item waiting for time.
This is enforced, not just intended
Your browser is told, in this site’s security headers, that Bluetooth is unavailable to it. The relevant header is Permissions-Policy: bluetooth=(), and you can see it in your browser’s developer tools under the network tab. Even if code were added tomorrow that tried to pair with a device, the browser would refuse it.
The same headers block every outbound network request the page could make, which is what keeps a typed reading on your device. The privacy page explains how to check it yourself.
The log’s restore function accepts only a backup file this site produced — not an export from a monitor’s companion app, a watch, or another service. That restriction is deliberate for the same reason.
What to do instead
Read the number off whatever device you own and type it in. The measurement guide collects the AHA’s published instructions on taking a reading that is worth recording, and the calculator shows where two numbers fall in the guideline’s table.