Encore Pro Question

GumbyGT,

When I try that MyCpap Card utility, it would not see my card or the reader. But if had first started encor softare, and then used the utility, it could read from the card.

What size is your Smart Card (what size is the saved .bin file from the MyCpap utility?)

elliejose wrote:Can anyone tell me about how many night's detailed data the smartcard holds??

Josie,

The card stores data in sessions rather than nights. The smartcard will store up to 7 sessions of detailed data. (and 6 months of stats) Thats assuming that you don't run into the M Series bug which makes you loose data occasionally.

jskinner, This was a very old thread, and I was the one who resurrected it yesterday.

So far I am seeing only 3 or one time 4 sessions. This is after looking at it for about 6 times. I am very new, and I have a new M series Auto with Aflex. Is it possible that it does not show some sessions at all, if they are 'empty', because I ran it with hose open for 30+ minutes? Is it possible that they have different storage sizes for those cards and they have started shipping with lower storage cards? I know my card is 32K (from the .bin file size of a backed up data image of the card).

Yes, for the first time I experienced a session data loss; last nights data was in the summary, but not in the details.

I am trying to find out why I am getting consistently only 3 or 4 sessions when most everybody else is seeing 6 or 7 details.

feeling_better wrote:So far I am seeing only 3 or one time 4 sessions. This is after looking at it for about 6 times.

Is your card being erased after each time you download it?

feeling_better wrote:Is it possible that they have different storage sizes for those cards and they have started shipping with lower storage cards?

Nope.

jskinner wrote:Is your card being erased after each time you download it?

No, I am keeping the old data. So far I have two weeks of history. From what I understand is that oldest detailed session is erased for making room for the latest. Which it has been doing, I aways see the last 3 or 4 days. BTW, this was the case starting from the beginning, after about 4 days it started erasing the first.

I am told the card will save upto about 6 month's summary. So I would be surprised if a few days' summary is taking up all that storage. I need to preserve, because by doc needs to see it.

How often are you reading your card?

If you don't read it within a few days, you will lose detail information. When I am monitoring it closely, I read the card every day or every other day to ensure that i don't lose any information.

If the full information is read, it is stored in the database and not lost at all.

If you go past 3-4 days (forget now), you then start losing data that was on the card but that has dropped off from the circular memory.

Krelvin wrote:How often are you reading your card?

If you don't read it within a few days, you will lose detail information. When I am monitoring it closely, I read the card every day or every other day to ensure that i don't lose any information.

If the full information is read, it is stored in the database and not lost at all.

If you go past 3-4 days (forget now), you then start losing data that was on the card but that has dropped off from the circular memory.

Krelvin, I read the data every day. The whole thread started because some people see 7 days' detail data on the card when they download, I only see 3 or 4. I am not trying to find a work around or anything like that. The only reason this might be significant for me is that once I know the card can hold say 6 days data, I need only do the downloading once every 5 days or so, when I reach a stage where I am not that eager to find the number every day, although I do not really want to lose any detail data.

So this thread is not asking for a solution, but trying to understand why it behaves differently for me --- not just by one night, but only 50% of what others see. A naturally curious person I am BTW I am using the machine for the full 7.5 to 8.5 hrs every night. If some of those 7 session people using it for less hours say 5 per night that would explain it.

Hi,

A couple of clarifications based on the little I do know:

* It's highly doubtful the Smartcard sizes would have changed

* Your drying would count as a session so you are getting at least 2 sessions per day based on your description - and sometimes an extra one so 3 days would be right.

* When the Smartcard data is written to the PC disk using the mycpap utility, it writes it as a binary file, which I believe is the likely source of the "32k" number. It writes that size no matter how little or how much data is on the Smartcard.

* The Smartcard will hold around 6 months of *compliance* data but only 6-7 days of detail data. How much detail data may also have some relationship to the length of time you sleep. I seem to recall having that missing data bug when I was catching up on my sleep deficit and sleeping more than 8 hours per night regularly.

Mindy

mindy wrote:Hi,

A couple of clarifications based on the little I do know:

* It's highly doubtful the Smartcard sizes would have changed[

That has been the view of many others. I think so too. If one of these who get 7days detail has ever used that mycpap backup and look at the saved file size, we can be certain about this.

* Your drying would count as a session so you are getting at least 2 sessions per day based on your description - and sometimes an extra one so 3 days would be right.

This is highly likely. But the 'drying sessions' are not visible at all. I have seen one session data once when I used it for about 90m during the day time. So the sw might simply be not even showing the empty drying sessions. I would know more about this in the next week or so, since I now take the card out >1hr before the drying, and dont put the card in >1hr after. I really dont know the 1hr interval is enough.

* When the Smartcard data is written to the PC disk using the mycpap utility, it writes it as a binary file, which I believe is the likely source of the "32k" number. It writes that size no matter how little or how much data is on the Smartcard.

This I know as fact.

* The Smartcard will hold around 6 months of *compliance* data but only 6-7 days of detail data. How much detail data may also have some relationship to the length of time you sleep. I seem to recall having that missing data bug when I was catching up on my sleep deficit and sleeping more than 8 hours per night regularly.

Mindy, you have raised a new very interesting angle! It is possible they allocate blocks in chunks of 8hrs for sessions, and a single >8hr session [which I have seen on my data] may take two of those shorter session space. This would really explain everything, but I somehow do not think those sw writers would be that unsophisticated. Hey, I have seen worse I have spent the better part of my whole life in sw related area.

The drying sessions may not be visible because there is no pressure recorded - they can still take up space on the Smartcard or perhaps a "day's" slot?. I've looked at the EncorePro data after exporting from the SQLServer database and it contains agonizing detail about all kinds of things - gadzillions of records per night. I've heard of others pulling the card part way out when they dry their hose on the machine just for that reason.

I'm not so sure it's as simple as >8 hours taking 2 "slots" but it's possible. I've been a programmer for over 40 years but that doesn't mean that I can figure out software for which I can't "see" the code.

Based on the data stored in the SQL Server database, it looks like it is has data for various events so the intervals are not "even". It's possible (not definite!!!) that having more apneas, hypopneas, snores, etc might result in more data being written to the card. Ergo, there are many possible explanations for what you're seeing.

I finally just quit worrying about it and have not had any lost data in quite a few months (haven't slept over 8 hours more than once or twice, either (and never more than once in a single week).


Mindy

There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread about how thing work with the data stored on the smart card. I'm not going to go though each post and address them but I will state a few things.

1. A session is an a time period from when the CPAP is turn on until its turned off.

2. A session does not equal one day/night

3. The number of sessions you get on a card is at max 7.

7. The only relationship sessions has to days is that the number of days stored on a card is always less than or equal to the number of sessions

Anonymous wrote:There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread about how thing work with the data stored on the smart card. I'm not going to go though each post and address them but I will state a few things.

1. A session is an a time period from when the CPAP is turn on until its turned off.

That is not what I observe. I can turn the machine off at the middle of the night, start the machine again within a few (<10 ?) minutes. And the machine shows the info before and after as one session. The break period is clearly visible on the graph of the pressure, which is SHOWN AS A BROKEN line in the detail report of the session.

My understanding is that a session termination is detected when that break exceeds some large period, such as one hr or more.

Feeling better - that last post was from James Skinner and if anyone would know how the Smartcard data works, he is the one. I wouldn't argue with him!

Mindy

Here is additional info from my experiments with a Resmed M-series Auto Aflex machine. By unplugging the card before starting the drying periods, (and putting the card back in only after about an hour after finishing the drying) I am now seeing up to 6 full nightly sessions of detailed data. This number of 6 is similar to what others have seen. I do not know how many minutes I have to wait before putting the card back in.

So it was the drying periods causing additional sessions, and not even shown in the list of details, that resulted in only about 3 sessions of details for me.

Another observation about 'turning off'. As far as session separation is concerned there appears to be two types of turn offs.

A. If the machine (M-series Auto Aflex) is turned off with the middle button normally as when you may to get up in the middle of the night, and then turned back on within some short duration (<10 minutes ?) the two periods are combined into one session and graphed in the detailed display, as I had indicated earlier.

B. However if the machine is turned off by unplugging the power, even with a short break of <10min, Encore Pro generates two separate detailed sessions the next day. Please note when I did this, I also changed the pressure setting. So it is not clear from my data alone if it is the unplugging of the power, or changing the pressure setting that caused the session separation.

Thank you to all of you, especially to Mindy, who guessed the cause of my fewer than normal number of sessions problem!