Indoplas aneroid sphygmomanometer IP168 review

At around ₱399 as of August 13, 2026, with a stethoscope, a 25.4 to 40.6cm cuff and a 0 to 300 mmHg gauge. Over ten thousand people have bought this, and many of them would be better served by a digital monitor.

It is designed for measuring someone else

A manual kit needs three things at once: one hand squeezing and releasing the bulb, the stethoscope head held over the artery at the elbow, and your eyes on the gauge while you listen.

Doing that on yourself is awkward, and the physical effort of pumping raises your own blood pressure, which is the measurement you are trying to take. Nurses and doctors use these on patients, not on themselves.

If you are buying a blood pressure monitor to check your own pressure at home, an automatic upper-arm monitor like the Indoplas BP105 is the right tool, and it is not expensive.

The skill is listening, and it is a real skill

What you are listening for are Korotkoff sounds: a tapping that appears as the cuff deflates past the systolic pressure, and disappears at the diastolic.

Finding the artery, getting the stethoscope in the right place, deflating at the right speed, around 2 to 3 mmHg per second, and identifying the exact moment the sounds start and stop all take practice. Deflate too fast and you will read low. Miss the first tap and you will read low. You also need a quiet room, which a Filipino household at six in the evening often is not.

The failure mode is the problem: a manual reading taken poorly does not announce itself. It produces a confident-looking number that is simply wrong.

Where it is genuinely the better buy

Two situations, and they are real.

A large arm. This cuff runs to 40.6cm, well past the 22 to 34cm on the standard digital monitors here. A cuff that is too small reads high, and for someone whose arm is outside the digital range, a manual kit with a wide cuff gives a more truthful reading than an automatic one that does not fit.

Someone with the training. A nurse, a caregiver, a barangay health worker, or a household with a family member who was taught properly. In those hands it is accurate, cheap, needs no batteries, and works during a brownout.

Some arrhythmias also confuse automatic monitors, where a trained listener can still get a reading, and that is a case a doctor would raise with you rather than one to self-diagnose.

The maintenance nobody does

Aneroid gauges drift. The mechanism is mechanical, and it is meant to be checked against a reference periodically.

Clinics do this. Home users almost never do, and a gauge that has drifted reads consistently wrong in a way you cannot detect from the numbers. If you keep one for years, that is worth knowing about.

Who should buy the IP168

Buy this if you have the training, or your arm is too large for a standard digital cuff, or you want a kit that works without power.

Skip it if you are measuring your own pressure and have not been taught how. The cheaper mistake is to buy an automatic monitor instead.

The automatic alternatives

For an upper-arm digital monitor with a standard cuff, see the Indoplas BP105. For a cheaper automatic monitor with a published accuracy figure, the Sinocare AXD-809 is under ₱600.