AAN 2026 | Digital health and wearable technologies for blood pressure control among stroke survivors

I think the area of using these newer technologies for blood pressure control and also for other vascular risk factors in medicine has been something of interest over the past more recent years with the more use of these technologies among people and being like the consumer devices being available to many people. And we specifically wanted to see what has been done so far to look into specific use of these for clinical purposes and how it can help with managing blood pressure, whether for patients who have suffered from a stroke already. We know that the biggest part of the secondary prevention in a stroke is controlling the vascular risk factors, and blood pressure is one of them that has a lot of value because many people may experience recurrent strokes, recurrent bleeds, because of the uncontrolled blood pressure, which could have its own reasons. But we wanted to see how these devices can help improve that process of secondary prevention, specifically for the blood pressure. And we did look at all of the studies that have been done so far from inception until late 2025, looking at this question and targeted a blood pressure intervention using any of the digital health interventions. We used a very broad term for digital health intervention. We did not specify to just wearable devices. It included the wearable devices. It included the smartwatches. It included the home blood pressure monitoring, but also any sort of telehealth was also included as part of that evaluation. And because of that, there was a lot of heterogeneity in their methodology, but the results were kind of interesting. I think what we found eventually was that these studies varied very differently with regards to what was the intervention, how engaged the treatment team, like the physicians and nurses were also with any intervention, and how they managed the data that they got from these digital health devices and tools. But also, we looked at the outcomes and see how much the blood pressure, how much they were able to lower the blood pressure using these devices. I’ll talk more about the limitations, but the main finding was that there was a positive finding. Specifically, when it comes to the systolic blood pressure, we saw a reduction of the systolic blood pressure in the population that underwent some sort of intervention using digital health as compared to the control group. And that reduction was statistically significant. There was a reduction in the diastolic blood pressure, but that reduction was not statistically significant in the meta-analysis.

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