Niloufar Banou Golchini

Hypertension remains a leading cause of morbidity worldwide, yet despite well established treatments, only half of Americans with high blood pressure have it under control. Blood pressure (BP) needs constant management, but patients spend only a few hours a year in the clinic, where most reliable monitoring still takes place.

As a result, care decisions often rely on a single clinic reading and on what patients can recall or have recorded on their own, neither of which may capture a patient’s true blood pressure patterns. Home monitoring is meant to fill that gap, yet many patients never get a cuff, and readings are often skewed by poor technique or the wrong cuff size. As a result, care decisions often rely on a single clinic reading and incomplete patient recall, and many patients with uncontrolled blood pressure go unnoticed between visits.

Niloufar Banou Golchini, an MD/MS Candidate at the UCSF School of Medicine–UC Berkeley Joint Medical Program and researcher at Computational Precision Health, is working to close that gap. Alongside Dr. Sunny Kishore, she is leading a study of a smartphone system developed by CareX.AI that uses the phone’s camera to measure blood pressure and heart rate. The study will evaluate how feasible, accurate, and scalable this approach is in a real clinical setting at UCSF Health, with the goal of eventually making it available to UCSF patients.

Her motivation is personal. “I grew up helping take care of my grandmother, who was paralyzed, and I saw firsthand how hard it is for patients with limited mobility to get to the clinic for routine monitoring,” Nilo says.

“There was definitely a gap between what was happening with her day to day and what her care team actually knew.”

As more of health is shaped at the Edge, in patients’ daily lives outside the clinic, it is more important than ever to have home technology that is accurate and practical enough to reach the care team. With the full picture, patients and clinicians can make better decisions together. The stakes are high: even small improvements in blood pressure control can meaningfully reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke, two of the leading causes of death, while also delivering significant financial value for health systems.

Nilo’s work shows what becomes possible when everyday technology meets clinical care. They are a glimpse of the future Edge Medicine is building toward, where care teams see the full picture of a patient’s health, not just the moments captured in a clinic.