Home Blood Pressure Monitoring in High-Risk Pregnancies

Home blood pressure monitoring has emerged as a vital adjunct to conventional antenatal care for women at elevated risk of hypertensive disorders. By enabling expectation-setting, early detection of blood pressure elevations and prompt clinical response, self-measurement programmes foster greater patient engagement and may alleviate the burden on over-stretched hospital services. Advances in validated automated devices and secure digital platforms now allow for reliable measurement, transmission and review of home readings. In high-risk pregnancies—involving chronic hypertension, gestational hypertension or risk factors for pre-eclampsia—regular self-monitoring supports individualised management, optimises timing of interventions and reduces anxiety through reassurance. Across diverse health-care settings, from tertiary centres to community clinics, home monitoring is being integrated into care pathways to enhance safety, improve outcomes and promote patient autonomy.

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Home Blood Pressure Monitoring in High-Risk Pregnancies publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in home blood pressure monitoring in high-risk pregnancies across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Self-monitoring of blood pressure (SMBP): The practice by which individuals measure and record their own blood pressure outside a clinical setting, typically using a validated automated device.

Telemonitoring: The remote transmission of health data—such as blood pressure readings and fetal heart rate—from the patient’s home to health-care providers for ongoing assessment and intervention.

Pre-eclampsia: A pregnancy-specific hypertensive disorder characterised by new-onset hypertension and proteinuria or end-organ dysfunction after 20 weeks of gestation, posing risks to both mother and fetus.

Gestational hypertension: New-onset hypertension (systolic ≥140 mmHg or diastolic ≥90 mmHg) arising after 20 weeks of gestation in the absence of proteinuria or other systemic features of pre-eclampsia.

References

1. Home telemonitoring versus hospital care in complicated pregnancies in the Netherlands: a randomised, controlled non-inferiority trial (HoTeL). The Lancet Digital Health (2023).
2. Detection and Control of Pregnancy Hypertension Using Self-Monitoring of Blood Pressure With Automated Telemonitoring: Cost Analyses of the BUMP Randomized Trials. Hypertension (2024).
3. Blood pressure self-monitoring in pregnancy: examining feasibility in a prospective cohort study. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth (2017).