More people die from high blood pressure than from anything else on earth, and you cannot feel a thing. It gives no symptom and no warning, right up until the stroke or heart attack that announces it. 1.4 billion people have it. Around 600 million have no idea.
So why don't we just catch it? Because the test that does is miserable. Diagnosing it properly takes a full 24 hours of readings, day and night, and the nighttime ones matter most. The standard way to get them is a cuff that inflates on your arm every half hour, all night. People can't sleep. They take it off. Doctors stop ordering it. And the deadliest condition on earth keeps slipping by, because the test that catches it is too unpleasant to finish.
An Israeli company called Biobeat fixed that. Their chest patch reads the pulse in your blood with light and calculates your pressure from it. No cuff, nothing squeezing you. You sleep right through. It's validated against the gold-standard cuff, published in the American Journal of Hypertension and FDA-cleared.
Then I looked at where it came from. The founders came out of Israel's Ministry of Defense. One of them built radar. Much of the research ran through the IDF Medical Corps, learning to catch a body sliding toward collapse before anyone in the room could. The patch on a grandmother's chest is the civilian face of that.
You can argue about a lot of things. You can't argue with the patch that finds the thing trying to kill you while there's still time to stop it.
Ben Allen