Fitbit Air owners have noticed that blood pressure tracking has appeared on their Google Health accounts, giving another health metric to track.
Unfortunately, this doesn't mean the is capable of measuring blood pressure yet. Instead, it's simply opened up the ability to manually track blood pressure trends.
Fitbit Air owners can now monitor blood pressure trends
You'll need a way to measure it, though
The debuted a new feature for Google's Fitbit devices — the ability to across a set period of time. Using a combination of the device's motion and health sensors, it can, in theory, monitor if your blood pressure has meaningfully changed across the week, month, or any other period.
It's important to note that this feature does not measure your blood pressure. Instead, it looks out for signs that your blood pressure may have changed. So, if it's important for you to keep an eye on your blood pressure, you'll need a separate device to do it for you.
At the moment, the Fitbit Air does not have the ability to track these trends, but a recent addition to the Google Health app has people hoping that will soon change.
According to a number of Air owners on Reddit, the option to log blood pressure in Google Health has finally appeared for them, allowing them to input the raw numbers from a blood pressure monitor and keep track of it in the app.
While this may not seem like much — the app is shared by other devices which track blood pressure, after all — this tracking feature has been missing for those with an Air, despite supposedly rolling out in update 5.12 last week.
As ever with these sorts of updates, it hasn't arrived on every single app out there, with a staged rollout seemingly being in effect. Some people aren't able to upgrade to version 5.12 yet, and even some of those who are don't have the ability to log their blood pressure.
We already knew the Fitbit Air would be getting access to the blood pressure monitoring and insulin resistance trend monitoring, but there's been a question mark over how long it would take for the feature to go active. With blood pressure logging opening up to Air owners, it's hoped it won't be too much longer before the Fitbit Air is able to keep a close eye on how your blood pressure might be doing.
On the whole, this is good news, and while it does require you to have a blood pressure measuring device to take advantage of it at the moment, the fact it's being opened up to Air owners hopefully means a final update to deliver the two new features is coming to the Air soon.
- Health sensors
- Optical heart rate, 3-axis accelerometer, temperature sensor
- 35 x 17 x 8.3mm (Module)