ADC 7002 Digital Blood Pressure Monitor - Portable Aneroid Sphygmomanometer with Reusable Adult BP Cuff (Purple) - Home Use, Clinic, Travel & Health Tracking

I can't even begin to say how much I wanted this to work but it doesn't work at all. According to the manual, as you inflate the cuff, a symbol of a beating heart appears and when it disappears you're supposed to inflate the cuff 20 more mmHg. The heart symbol NEVER appears as you pump up. You can go to 250 and it won't appear. As soon as you stop pumping then it briefly flashes on. The instrument monitors the rate at which you deflate the cuff. The manual says that you should ideally deflate it at 2-3 mmHg per second. Good luck with that! It's just about impossible to make the cuff deflate smoothly. I've never had a problem deflating a blood pressure cuff but the reading jumps to 12 then to 0.2 --- it's just about impossible to keep the deflation rate at the suggested 2-3. If you do manage to get it at the right rate once in awhile, it's agonizingly slow and then suddenly just stops. As the cuff deflates, even if you are able to hold it steady, the numbers for the BP do not smoothly go down but they jump by several digits at a time.I wanted this to work so much that I called the company. I was told that there are some versions that don't work properly but that the one with the "marker" button should work. They offered to replace the unit but I'm sending it back to Amazon because I think that it's unlikely that the flaws are limited to one unit.One last thing --- about that marker button. The idea is that once you get the cuff fully inflated you're supposed to watch for the heart symbol to reappear and that tells you that you are "within about 20 mg of systolic pressure". Then they suggest that you press the "marker" button and after you're done the unit will display what the value was when you were getting near the systolic pressure. Is it just me or is that a pretty worthless feature? Why would I want to remember a "gee I'm getting close" number in the first place as opposed to the actual systolic pressure? It's like taking BP by watching when the needle jumps -- maybe somewhere around there. What I had expected, silly me, was that there would be a visual notification at the systolic BP, an aid to hearing the sounds. OK, even if the little beating heart doesn't work as advertised, you could make an argument for the ease of reading a nice, lit, digital display when you hear the sounds except it's so difficult to steadily deflate the cuff and the numbers jump by multiple digits so it's pretty hard to have any confidence in any reading that you take a guess at.As I said, I really wanted this to work so I return it sadly.