Tuesday 5 March 2013

Casio JP-200W Exercise Pulse Monitor

It's retro gadget watch time again!
One of my most popular watches on the blog is my Casio BP-120 Blood Pressure Monitor watch, and today's watch is a forerunner to that one.

The watch is the Casio Exercise Pulse Monitor, and has a model number of JP-200W. It looks like a normal LCD watch with two lines of numbers, apart from the green blob on the right side. This is the pulse monitor's sensor. You start the pulse monitor with the left middle button, which starts by showing the word pulse flashing on the top line, followed by timer. Holding your finger lightly on the sensor starts he reading, with the pulses animated along a pink line of LCD between the two lines of numbers, and the beats per minute (bpm) are shown at the bottom. Above the pulse animation is a line which shows your bpm in relation to the aerobic zone (which I guess can be reset), so you can monitor how long and how far you are in the zone. The main problem with this type of sensor is that you need to hold your finger quite steady, so getting your pulse during exercise is rather hard.

Normally, the LCD display shows day and date on the top line (which can have up to 6 digits), with the time on the bottom line (6 digits with smaller seconds) The watch has other modes - alarm, timer, stopwatch, and exercise data recall.

Module-wise, the watch uses a 1009 module, and this model was made in Malaysia. It came out in 1992 as a sequel to Casio first pulse watch (the JP-100), and originally cost around $50.

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