Much before Apple Watch, Fitbit or the so-called ‘wearables’ became fashionable, my mother-in-law asked for a blood pressure monitor from Dubai.

My wife drove me and the pharmacists crazy, trying to research what would be the best monitor for her mother. “She says she has high BP in the mornings,” said my wife as we drove around town to various pharmacies.

“I would have thought the best way to deal with it was to cut down on salt, exercise and eat broiled stuff, and not go around taking your blood pressure readings all the time”, I told my wife, who got miffed over my advice.

We finally decided that a wristwatch monitor would do the job and bought it. We had to refuse and say, “No thanks”, to the pharmacist who wanted us to buy a blood sugar meter also, the one where you prick yourself and get a drop of blood and check your glucose level, in the comfort of your home, without having to go to the “germ-infested clinic”.

It’s a good thing that my mother-in-law hates the sight of blood or she would have got the housemaid to set up a lab in the living room and make her do tests for cholesterol and diabetes. She hates Shinde, the medical technician who comes on a noisy motorbike to her home to periodically take her blood samples and forgets his “dirty helmet” in her living room.

A few days after we dispatched the wristwatch monitor, we got a call from my mother-in-law who said she hated the ugly watch and that it gave the wrong reading most of the time. “Please buy the arm-type monitor,” she said.

Childhood memories

Listening to her brought back memories of my childhood when the family doctor would come home with his brown bag that had many tiny compartments for various instruments. From the bag, the doctor would pull out the arm-type BP monitor. It came in a long, silver-coloured rectangular box and as the doctor put the cuff on my upper arm, it went whisk-whisk as it tightened, and then with a slow whoosh it would release the pressure on my arm.

The other day when I went in for a check-up, a nurse took me to an examination room and strapped me to an upright machine that checked my BP. “You are OK,” she said, and I asked her what the reading was and she said, “120 by 70”. “Is that normal?” I asked, and she looked at me strangely and said, “Yes”.

The arm-type monitor was also not good enough for my mother-in-law and she got the housemaid to take the readings from both her arms and at various times of the day, whenever she got “palpitations”. Having hypertension was apparently giving her more stress.

The other day I met a heart surgeon and asked how his sleek wearable on his wrist was helping him. “I have walked 1,000 steps so far,” he said proudly.

It seems that the ancient art of walking that was practiced by our forbears, when men would put on ill-fitting khaki shorts at the break of dawn and lace on their white sneakers with calf-length white socks, has fallen by the wayside as time has gone by.

Now with people sitting a lot most of the day, wearables remind us to get off our backsides and go for that walk.

My mother-in-law has not seen pictures of the Apple Watch, but I am sure she would not want it. It looks like what some crazy teenager who seems zonked out due to lack of sleep, would wear on her wrist.

Anyway, who would want to be reminded by your watch that your heart is beating fast as you sit in a traffic jam?