#22 Export SleepyHead program along with data

[Oscar Carrillo]

Exporting the data so that it could be viewed easily by a medical provider would be very useful.

Downloading the latest software for Windows/Mac/Linux and putting it along with the CPAP data.
It would be great to be able to run it directly without installing anything, if possible.

Then the medical provider could open the folder and click on a file and the patient's data loads for them to peruse in SleepyHead.

[RonCam]

I think ... are you asking for a 'Portable Sleepyhead'? I haven't fully researched this, but see if this meets your needs:

http://portableapps.com/

If the app is made portable, then it would be no problem to have it read the data, maybe in a different directory on the same flash drive or optical disc?

[Mark Watkins]

It is technically possible to build a binary containing all the DLL's, which doesn't need to be installed, but there would be a few other issues getting in the way of it working like that.

SleepyHead is designed for personal data review by the patient, it is not meant for doctors or sleep industry professionals. They are of course certainly welcome to play and explore if they wish, but it's simply not possible without the backing of the manufacturers to provide a guarantee data is being interpreted "correctly" enough to satisfy the requirements for medical usage.

I'd love to see a few manufactures get behind something like SleepyHead to make it awesome.. Maybe provide some kinda data link mechanism for a professional "medically approved" version. Wishful thinking perhaps?

[Richard Freeman]

Be careful what you wish for. I work in the pharmaceutical industry, though not on software for anything considered a medical device. Our software change/validation requirements are probably only a tenth as stringent as for devices, and they're still incredibly onerous.

For starters, how would you like to write up a full requirements and design specification for SleepyHead? :) Then go ahead and "prove" that what is packaged behaves like you described (not that any such "proof" is really possible with software).

The reason the proprietary software costs so much is twofold. One is that it really does cost quite a bit to make. The second stems from the first - since it is so expensive to make there is almost no competition, which means you can charge what the market will bear. Ever compare the price of a GPS unit for an airplane against a similar unit for a car?

[GhostOfTheSky]

Hi Mark,

Would you be able to include a raw data export? You already graph the data, so I hope it wouldn't be too hard. (I suppose I could try to hack this in myself and submit a patch, but my programming experience is somewhat limited)

I am interested in running the data through various transformations and applying various algorithms to it. I would have used your resmed loader cpp as is, but you're using QT constructs in it and I don't know if I could successfully refactor it into an ANSI C version.