CONTEC ABPM50 Handheld 24hours Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitor with PC Software for Continuous Monitoring NIBP USB Port with Three Cuffs

I normally do not provide long reviews, but in this case it is necessary. First of all this appears to be an excellent device, however it is lacking documentation and has at least one problem I am still dealing with. I acquired this device to monitor my wife’s blood pressure, as she has been wrestling with changes of medications since recently having a stroke, paralyzing her left side. Setting up the device is fairly intuitive and I was able to get it working rather quickly. Our goal was to have my wife wear it during the day and have it take a reading every half hour. This worked as advertised. We were able to access a list of the readings on the device using the list option. Then I attempted to connect the device to a Windows PC using the USB cable they provided. It never did connect. I emailed my problem to Contec and received a rather prompt reply requesting that I download the latest copy of their software at the address they provided. I uninstalled the copy I had and did a re-install of the new software. This is where I encountered my first serious problem. The new software that you download is not a normal ZIP file, it is a RAR file. Windows cannot open it. You will need to install an application that will unpack and open a RAR file. There are several in the Microsoft store, including free ones. Once I did that the software did load properly. There is no mention of this in any of the provided documentation. I connected the device, using the USB cable and was able to download the data into the software. Beware though the device continues to say it is connecting to the PC and never does say it is connected. But it is. Voila – A great set of reports appears on the monitor. So far so good. After scanning the reports, and frankly being impressed, I clicked on one of the icons to prepare a report that can be printed. Serious problem number two. The report is great and would certainly provide a provider with some great information, however I still have not been able to print it. I have a new Canon printer that works great. It prints everything we throw at it, except for this report. It returns an error message that says the report has problems and cannot be printed. I’ve tried everything I can think of, no luck. I have contacted Contec and have not heard back yet. Once you generate the report you are not given any option except to print it. You cannot email it, save it, or share it in any way. It is worthless on my PC. I need to be able to share it with our provider. Hopefully they will provide me with a solution to the problem. The main objective of the software is to provide information to a health care provider, and short of hauling your entire PC into their office, there is no way to accomplish this. Sorry for being so long winded, but hopefully my experience might help someone. Don’t give up on it and return it. The device provides a lot of valuable information that you have no other way of getting. Update!!! My printing problem has been resolved and I have changed my rating from a 4 star to a 5 star. Contec support was excellent. They reviewed my problems, did not attempt to tell me it was all my fault, provided me with some updates to their software and everything works just fine.

We used this for home hospice. We were able to set the machine to do blood pressure checks every 15 minutes with an alarm if it was outside of the range we set. It was like we had hospital vitals monitoring. You do need to read the instructions if you’re going to set the periodic monitoring and alarms. It’s easy to understand and read the pressures. The accuracy was checked with a nurse using a manual cuff for comparison. It also comes with multiple sizes of arm cuffs. Overall, much higher quality than the typical at home monitoring and cuffs.