CPAP software community proposal

[rada]

Hi Akhtar,
I'm getting some tests on myself at Hopkins hospital at the moment and in wait-mode on the hospital patient computer and thus need to be brief. However, I was keen to ask about your respironics database situation. I have only direct experience with a ResMed machine which uses 'rlk' files that others here have convinced me I would never be able to read directly. With Respironics, does the data go into a relational database that you can readily access? How much data is there? With Resmed I can export into a 'csv' file the summary data but what I want are further details, such as when an apneic event of what duration occurred -- do you get that with respironics? As regards my software development progress for sleep apnea, it is virtually non-existent to this stage but something I want to do. I have been collecting data from my CMS, my webcam (manually coded), and my ResScan (partially manually coded) for a couple months -- you're welcome to that. I wrote an Excel VBA program to give me average SpO2 across time intervals for my CMS data but that is trivial and not even user-friendly. I have experience as a software developer but that has not manifested itself yet in this work with my sleep apnea, although I have decided to address that for the future -- the past couple of years I had been working on theories and software to use evolutionary computation in analyzing financial statements and doing portfolio management. This message is getting too long but allow me to conclude with noting that I am thinking much of the time about the proposal that I raised in this thread and I am determined to pursue it in whatever fashion works best with whatever other interested parties I can find. Based on the feedback to date from cpaptalk which has been very helpful (though needing to teach me a painful lesson about my over-ambition with under-education), I have been thinking that I need to begin with a less ambitious approach than an open source project but rather
1) begin with a review of existing situations for doctors, DMEs, and patients as regards information they can access, standards they use, and software they use and
2) focus on the challenges for patients like ourselves (who I think represent a special breed that is underserved currently by the DMEs and doctors) and
3) try to identify the requirements for information and tools that would help us (but also help DMEs and doctors serve patients and give DMEs and doctors further insight into the public health dilemma).
I have exceeded my time limit but find this topic too interesting to stop and since we are still in brain-storming mode allow me to add one last thought. I am also toying with the idea of a kind of one-person (myself) longitudinal case study (that could be extended into an enthnographic or field study) as to
1) what tools I first used to manage my sleep apnea
2) how that has evolved over time from initially only the LED display of the ResMed respirator to ResScan, to pulse oximeter, and to webcam without adequate data integration and interpretation and
3) how the desire now is for yet further sources of data, such as an EEG, and
4) investigate under what circumstances what kinds of benefit could come to certain patients from how much sleep study information in the home.
Thanks,
Roy

[bart.willems]

The software from each manufacturer is different.
The data files and structures are different.......from manufacturer to manufacturer and from machine generation to machine generation.
The manufacturers write different versions of software for each generation of machine they release. (most are backwards compatible)

Wouldn't the idea be to come up with an open, generic data standard? Then you can write a "digester" that converts proprietary data from each machine to a generic format (xml comes to mind). There is still the legal issue of course but that's a different issue; I write computer code, not legal code.

The second part would be open source software that feeds off the generic xml feed. No legal issues there; the software is simply feeding of data provided by an open standard.

The software to download and interpret the nightly data from the manufacturer's machines IS already available.....if you know where to look.
The "wheel" has already been invented.
Anybody whose time is worth anything, would only be wasting it.......not to mention the amount of money needed to fight any court battles with the companies who thought their proprietary and copyrighted technology was being tampered with or re-engineered without their written permission.

But the problem is that when I like the ResMed software more than the Sandman software, I'm up on a certain creek without a paddle. Or if I'm only interested in a very simple output without a lot of bells and whistles I'm still forced to buy the CPAP equivalent of "Photoshop CS4" because my vendor is not selling a cheaper "Photoshop Elements". It's not that the software isn't there, it's that it doesn't meet our requirements, either functional or financial.

As for DMCA: I'm not a lawyer, but if I recall the cases were about people enabling other people to "illegally" (there's a discussion on what's "fair use" and what's not) access software. That wouldn't be the case here. But I agree that the discussion is moot: they can simply force you into bankruptcy with expensive trials (at least until the Californion anti-SLAPP law is adapted in all other states).