Can Arterial Stiffness Be Measured on a Bathroom Scale?

The history of technological development is full of examples in which the often unusual coupling of two separate principles into a single device led to breakthrough technological advancements. Around 1450 in Strasbourg, Gutenberg combined the flexibility of a coin punch with the power of a wine press and invented the printer. Probably no one at that time would expect how much this invention contributed to spread the knowledge throughout the entire world in later centuries. In the field of hypertension, the combination of principles of mercury sphygmomanometry, invented by Riva Rocci in 1890,¹ with the technique of auscultation of blood flow sounds described by Korotkoff in 1905,² enabled for the first time the measurement of systolic and diastolic brachial blood pressure values. The outstanding and unpredictable success associated with the possibility to obtain measures of blood pressure is well acknowledged. Needless to say that for any given successful technological combination, many others will have turned out as unfavorable combinations.

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