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Answer transcribed from Brightway's interview with Dr. Cristen Gordon (pt.2):
This question comes up quite often. Not just with aneurysm, but stroke patients are always concerned that there is some inherent risk, but it's unlikely. The first thing to do is talk with your doctor, the physician, about where your body physically stands. The doctor can give you some idea of what we call parameters on where to exercise. Parameters are based on your vital signs, and your doctor may give you a safe heart rate range. For example, they may say that you want to exercise until your heart rate is between 100 and 105 or 90 to 100, something like that. As a therapist, we could show you how to monitor your heart rate and make sure that you're staying within range. The parameters could also be around blood pressure or oxygen levels, so there are some tests that your doctors can do to figure out what those parameters may need to be. They may also be able to figure it out based on your health history as well. What would happen is if it was a concern but your doctor wanted you to do physical therapy, they will send those numbers either through you or they should contact your therapist to give them the correct parameters as well. Once you've done some exercise with your therapist and start to feel a little bit more comfortable, where you feel good about how to monitor your symptoms, your heart rate, and everything like that, then the therapist will teach you some exercises to start doing outside of there and you can build from there.
We recommend patients buy blood pressure cuffs to measure their numbers if it's part of what's going on with them. The other thing is called a pulse oximeter, which is just a little clip. Basically, you can put your finger into the clip and it monitors your heart rate based on what it reads from your fingertip. Believe it or not, cell phones have pulse oximeters on them as well now. You can download apps and they use the light from your camera in order to look at your heart rate through your fingertip as well. I've done that on Apple and Android devices, but I believe Apple also has blood pressure cuffs that can Bluetooth connect to your phone and measure your blood pressure and heart rate as well.