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Do any other of the inexpensive finger pulse-Ox devices allow easy downloading to a PC the next day (as opposed to real-time data collection on PC) ?

liv2kite wrote:Do any other of the inexpensive finger pulse-Ox devices allow easy downloading to a PC the next day (as opposed to real-time data collection on PC) ?

There are a number of other Contec "CMS" pluse oximeters that will do just that. Do a search for CMS threads here.

Cheers,

Bill

liv2kite wrote:Do any other of the inexpensive finger pulse-Ox devices allow easy downloading to a PC the next day (as opposed to real-time data collection on PC) ?

Check out, for example, semedicalsupply.com. Any pulse-ox that is listed as having monitoring software will do what you mention.

dmstangu wrote:

jnk wrote:

Guest wrote:Did I miss where it said recording? or overnite?

That would be the purpose of the software, I assume. The site says it has both "realtime display software" and "Sleep Study Software and Report System." To me that implies overnight and recording, but it isn't directly stated, (unless it's in Chinese ). Every other Contec pulse oximeter that comes with software can record data. But that is a good question, guest. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm wondering about.


Hawthorne, echostore.com has an unsatifactory rating with the bbb: http://chicago.bbb.org/WWWRoot/Report.a ... m=88012207

That's interesting. They show a link on their website to BBB which opens up a totally different echostore.com. This one is, ofkors, satisfactory...
http://chicago.bbb.org/WWWRoot/Report.a ... m=88022883

Which one is the right one now?

Yeah but I wonder how many of those problems were related to Windows Vista?

Is it the product doesn't work as advertised? or they couldn't get the software installed? I mean look at all the complaints
we get just trying to install EncorePro. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years and still couldn't install that
crap on my Sony Vaio S260 running XP. Can only imagine what someone with no experience had attempting the same.

There are other pulse oximeters out there, nearly all of them grossly overpriced for what you get. 24 BBB complaints in 36 months,
even though they have only been in business like 13 months. How many complaints did NOT get reported to the BBB?

My guess is a lot more than just 24.

Slinky wrote:I ran my laptop overnite 4-5 different nites and burned up the power supply. I now have a laptop cooler that I make sure to use.

Are you sure you didn't sit your S8 on top of it?

That would explain the flame up !

Snoredog wrote: . . . other pulse oximeters out there, nearly all of them grossly overpriced . . .

I bought a used MD300A from semedicalsupply for $149 shipped when they had a Web special. I like it, and it was a good price, but it only samples and records pulse and O2 once every minute and can only show the info from its screen. I think I would get a lot better info with that CMS software. I shoulda waited and saved up. My momma never said I was bright.

You better duck, Snoredog. I think Slinky may be getting ready to whack you again!

SMACK! Yer just jealous, SnoreDog, cause I have such good music stored on my laptop. I ran it all night long when I was in the hospital listening to my music. Sure enjoyed it one heck of a whole lot more than TV!

Review of PC based recording Pulse-Oximeter

I've had my CMS-P for about a week now. If you are looking for a low cost recording oximeter, this might appeal to you.

I got it on a "buy-it-now" eBay auction for $99 including free EMS shipping from vendor "medonline888". EMS shipping is quite fast - I had it in four working days. Of course, the CMS-P is available elsewhere for $99 + shipping, but I've never had any problems with buying from China via eBay so I went for it.

The storage container is kind of interesting. It's in a metal can with a window on top. The software CD is actually in the can also - it's one of the mini CD's.



Finger sensor:

The finger sensor unit has no fancy display or readout like the higher priced CMS models. This seems appropriate to me since I really can't watch a readout while I'm sleeping anyway. It's powered by the USB port from your PC, so no batteries are needed.



There were no instructions on how to use the sensor itself, so I just stuck it on my finger
I did find it helpful to secure the probe and the cord to your finger with some type of medical bandage tape to reduce the chances of it being pulled off in your sleep.
The finger sensor feels well made. The USB cable is about 10 feet long and has strain reliefs built into both the sensor and USB plug ends. It feels comfortable when you place it on your finger. The pivot point is floating, so it will adjust to thicker fingers to allow a relatively uniform pressure across the entire padded area that contacts your finger. I have experienced some soreness in the area right behind my fingernail after wearing the sensor for an entire night. I can't quite figure out why this is happening. If anyone has an explanation or suggestion, I'd welcome your input.
UPDATE: I may have been placing my finger to far into the sensor - the LED's should apparently be centered over the nail bed.

The Software:

The software that gets installed on your PC consists of two programs: SpO2 Manager and SpO2 Review.

SpO2 Manager is the real time display and recording program. The program is able to display real time data for 4 patients simultaneously - presumably by connecting 4 sensors to the PC at once. Patient windows can be drug around and rearranged if needed. Double clicking on the active window (or any window) will blow it up to fill the entire window alone. This is probably the first thing you will do if you only have one sensor connected. Window displays can also be selected via icons at the bottom of the screen. The SpO2 manager screen shows a running trend graph of both pulse rate and SpO2 saturation levels. That graph takes up a little over half the screen. The window period of this trend graph can be set to 1min, 10min, 30min, or 60 minutes.
Below the running trend graph is a real time display of your pulse in a classic medical oscilloscope format (very cool).
Along the right side of the screen is a numeric readout of your pulse rate in BPM and your SpO2 percentage. In the bottom right corner is some eye candy consisting of a little heart beating and a pulsing bar graph.
The bottom of the screen has several other control buttons (in addition to the patient window selection icons already mentioned). The "i" control button is for entering patient information in the currently selected window (if active). There is a language selection pull-down, and also a printer button - for report generation, that will be described below.
Alarm levels can be set by right clicking in the units area on the left or right hand side of the running trend graph area. These are visual alarms only - no sound options that I could find.

Recording data:

Recording of data begins as soon as SpO2 manager starts. For this reason, I prefer to have the sensor attached and secured to my finger before I start the program. The preferred method for storing data when your session is over is to unplug the USB cable. When unplugging the sensor, the program will prompt you to enter the patient information once more if you forgot to enter it earlier. It will then auto-generate a file name (changeable) and will save three data files. The binary data file has an .spo extension. This is the file that can be loaded into SpO2 Review which will be described next. Also saved are two .csv files that can be loaded into MS excel for plotting. One of the .csv files contains the data for the trend graph, the other file (which tends to be huge) is the pulse trace data. An 8.5 hour session generated an .spo file that was only 150kb in size. Here is a screenshot of SpO2 manager running on my computer.



Reviewing data and generating reports:

SpO2 Review is the program that is used to quickly view the data and to generate reports. The data from previous sessions is stored in the .spo files as described above. SpO2 review can also directly download data from some of the higher priced recording oximeters (such as the CMS-50E and CMS-60), but in this case, it is just used to open data files created by SpO2 manager. After the file is loaded, the trend graph is displayed. At this point you can select the time window and can also scroll or page through the data.



The most useful part of SpO2 Review is the report generation options that appear when you click on the printer icon. The reports can also be previewed before printing. Here examples of the four types of reports. (These are .pdf files)

OxiMetry Report
Summary Report
Full Study Report
Strip Chart Report

I find the OxiMetry report the most useful (it's the first link listed above).
The Summary report is similar to the OxiMetry report, except with a few things deleted to make room for doctor comments, etc.
The Full Study report shows the entire trend graph in a stretched-out format (may be multiple pages in length)
The Strip Chart report allows you to print a zoomed in area of the chart.

That about covers my experiences with the CMS-P so far. I did encounter a problem trying to run the programs on my old W2K laptop with only 128mb of ram. Both programs would crash with a stack overflow error when run. I'm not sure if it was a W2K problem, a lack memory problem, or what. I have loaded the software onto two other WinXP desktops, in addition to my Vista laptop and all ran the software fine. All of those machines had 2gb of memory.

For a review of the CMS-50E, you might want to refer to this thread:
viewtopic/t28525/Report-on-CMS50E-Pulse-Oximeter.html
The same software is used on both the CMS-50E and the CMS-P. (and various other CMS oximeters that have recording capability)

Wow, late4work! Thanks!

Very helpful. Outstanding review.

One day maybe I'll get up the nerve to buy on E-bay. And from China.

jeff

Here is an (excellent) review of another CMS oximeter - this one is the CMS-60D, which sells for about $250.
viewtopic/t34394/REVIEW-Contec-CMS60D-H ... meter.html
There are some good links there that describe the software installation and the operation of the SpO2 review program.

The CMS-60D appears to use the same basic finger sensor as the CMS-P. It seems like the infrared LED in these finger sensors is going to cause a burning sensation for many people. It takes a day or two for the feeling to go away. This could be the biggest negative aspect of this product. I'm going to try flipping the finger sensor over so that the LEDs are on the bottom of my finger instead of the top. I'm thinking that the bottom of my finger might be less sensitive to the IR than the spot right behind my finger nail.

Noise from the notebook PC was a non-issue for me. I set up a power plan on my Compaq notebook that ran it at 50% CPU (on AC power) when having the oximeter connected overnight. The fan noise was then diminished so much that it was almost inaudible. The only noise I heard was from my CPAP, and both of them were only three feet away.

late4work wrote:I've had my CMS-P for about a week now. If you are looking for a low cost oximeter, this might appeal to you...
The storage container is kind of interesting. It's in a metal can with a window on top. The software CD is actually in the can also - it's one of the mini CD's that are somewhat rare, but that all CD drives seem to be able to read...

Hi late4work, Thank you for providing this info, and adding a link to here from the other cms-60D product review thread. Without that msg in the other thread, I would have missed this thread.

Am I missing something here ? You have an image of the packing can, and the finger probe, no image of the 'meter proper'. Is the shown finger probe the actual meter? If not, could you please include an image of the meter? Thank you.

feeling_better wrote:

late4work wrote:I've had my CMS-P for about a week now. If you are looking for a low cost oximeter, this might appeal to you...
The storage container is kind of interesting. It's in a metal can with a window on top. The software CD is actually in the can also - it's one of the mini CD's that are somewhat rare, but that all CD drives seem to be able to read...

Hi late4work, Thank you for providing this info, and adding a link to here from the other cms-60D product review thread. Without that msg in the other thread, I would have missed this thread.

Am I missing something here ? You have an image of the packing can, and the finger probe, no image of the 'meter proper'. Is the shown finger probe the actual meter? If not, could you please include an image of the meter? Thank you.

Hi feeling_better - what you are missing is that there IS something missing

Seriously, the difference is that the CMS-P probe plugs directly into your USB port. Your notebook computer, PC or whatever is the METER.
Basically this works more like the sensor they use in sleep labs, etc. The probe has a very long wire coming off of it which leads off somewhere to be connected to a data gathering machine. In this case, that machine is my notebook PC. If you want to monitor the data in real-time, you look at the computer screen. But, once the program is started and recording data, I turn off the display on my notebook PC while the data is sent directly to it as I sleep. The probe is powered off the USB port so it needs no batteries.
If you don't have a notebook PC or other computer that you can place near your bedside, then this isn't an viable option. But, for those who do, it is cheaper because it eliminates a piece of hardware that is serving as little more than an intermediary storage device.

I'm going to try flipping the finger sensor over so that the LEDs are on the bottom of my finger instead of the top. I'm thinking that the bottom of my finger might be less sensitive to the IR than the spot right behind my finger nail.

The LED should be at the center of the nail bed, those things are designed to shine down through the nail bed.

Hmmm, maybe that's the problem - I have the sensor to far down on my finger. I'll try to position the LEDs directly over the middle of my fingernail.
Thanks!