Hi Celia,
This is in reply to your question about whether or not A-fib might show up on a blood pressure monitor if you were having an episode while you were taking your blood pressure.

The short answer is that you won't get notification of "possible A-fib" like you would with a Kardia mobile or a Smart Watch, but you might well get some indication of an irregular heart rate. Many of the blood pressure machines ( the one I'm most familiar with is the Omron series) have irregular heart rate indicators, look sort of like multiple hearts overlapping each other. These irregular heart rate indicators are displayed if the heart beat intervals differ from each other for two or more of the heart beats while the blood pressure is being taken. It doesn't indicate what type of an arrhythmia is going on, just an irregular rhythm going on.

The heart rate is also displayed, if tachycardia is shown ( more than 100 BPM) that could be an indication of some type of an arrhythmia, although A-fib can also occur in the normal BPM range.

I haven't had this happen recently, thank goodness, but in the past before my cardiac electrical issues were diagnosed and controlled, my tachyarrhythmias would be so bad that I wouldn't be able to get a blood pressure reading at all, in those cases I'd just get error messages, but no reading. Sometimes when that happens you can repeat the blood pressure and you might get a reading the second time, or at a later time.