The Japan Home-health Apparatus Industrial Association: investigation of home-use electronic sphygmomanometers

The Japanese Home-health Apparatus Industrial Association is an official independent organization comprising ten departments. That concerned with home electronic sphygmomanometers, which has seven participants from different Japanese manufacturers, has already undertaken and is currently involved in various activities related to voluntary standards for performance validation and quality assurance. Because Japanese companies form a large proportion of manufacturers, these activities are important in terms of autonomic regulation. Although many improvements have been made to home electronic sphygmomanometers, some problems still remain unresolved, especially in terms of measurement reliability and easy operation by lay people. Another aspect of the department's work relates to making proposals on major validation standards, such as those of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, the British Hypertension Society and Comite Europeen de Normalisation (CEN). Clinical validation should be discussed in order to define a more accurate standard method of measurement using auscultation and more appropriate criteria that are unaffected by primary blood pressure variation. (C) 2001 Lippincott Williams Wilkins.