A day spent getting to the heart of hypertension

Clinicians, commissioners and healthcare industry experts gathered for a Health Innovation Event on Tuesday, to explore the field of blood pressure monitoring and management with the help of leading speakers and a showcase of innovations.

With the scale of hypertension across the global population projected to play a role in countless premature deaths, the digital technology possibilities for monitoring and detecting problematic blood pressure are likely to play an increasingly important role.

Among the technologies on show at the event in London’s Francis Crick Institute was Lifelight, the world’s first contactless medical device for measuring blood pressure and heart rate, using only software linked to a camera.

Joining Lifelight’s Chief Executive and Founder, Laurence Pearce, on stage to address the audience of about 100 were Alec Price-Forbes and Helen Williams of NHS England, Geraint Lewis of Microsoft, and Dr Manish Saxena, an executive committee member of the British and IrishHypertension Society.

Frank Ratcliff, Director of Industry and Innovation said: “It was a truly outstanding event with speakers and technologies of national, and international, importance coming together to guide our audience through the crucial topics of technology and techniques and how they can have an impact on the preventable outcomes that arise from hypertension.

“We heard and witnessed many of the innovative approaches and devices being used to prevent cardiac conditions, crucial steps towards meeting the Government's ambition for the NHS and reducing the human cost of chronic and fatal heart complaints.”

The audience heard how the risk of heart failure has risen to one in four people during their lifetime, that 1.3 billion worldwide are known to hypertension and nearly half that number are estimated to be undiagnosed. There are also about 3.5 million over 40s in England who haven’t had a blood pressure check in the past five years.

Laurence Pearce, Founder and Chief Executive of Lifelight, said: "As sponsors of the event, we are really keen to see people engaged, to collaborate and network; these face-to-face events now are really important for getting people back together again. Bringing people together in cardiovascular prevention for me is really important, particularly with Lifelight at the heart of this ability to measure pressure digitally.”