How to Record Blood Pressure for HealthKit with Shortcuts

by Rian

While there are good blood pressure monitors with IoT features attached, not all products support Apple HealthKit, let alone have accuracy required to be useful. As some reviews would have put it, smart BPM may not have ‘bang for the buck’, and the convenience offered by the device may not worth the bother if the measurements weren’t accurate in the first place.

This being in 2025, I’ve seen fair share of manufacturers taking great advantage of health-related APIs and platforms with apps that meet the basic standards. I believe it isn’t the app support these lines of products now must strive to achieve. It’s still the accuracy and convenience in measuring. For what it’s worth, one of my oldest BPM has more ergonomic design than more recent IoT-enabled device which failed in both accuracy and accessibility categories.

If you are inclined to keep using the BPM, the ones that still work, you can start journaling the data over to HealthKit via Apple’s Health app. I wrote a simple custom shortcut that will help logging it.

1. Download Log Blood Pressure and initialize. Upon downloading and opening the shortcut, you will see “Log Health Sample” actions need permission to Health Data to write (i.e. log) blood pressures. Please enable them.*
2. (opt.) If you are not interested in logging pulse rate info, last two actions, one to ask “Pulse/min” and “Log Health Sample” can be removed.
3. (opt.) If you want fast access to the shortcut from Home Screen, press Share button from the bottom row, and choose “Add to Home Screen”. You can launch the shortcut from with an app-like icon on the Home Menu.
   

*It will ask for permission to read and write from Apple HealthKit, but it only need those permissions to log. If you are so inclined, you can create your own shortcut after examining what mine looks like.

There are rumors BPM will be the next prey of smartwatches and rings. I don’t know the technicality behind it, but should it be as common as A-Fib detection, it could lead to saving many more lives. Hopefully we can imagine all this efforts will go retro, but until then, let’s do what we can with what we have.