Hidden Data

These people are such jerks! I don’t know if this is sheer incompetence on their part or the simple greed of wanting me to make a doctor visit every time I want to change a setting.

I spent a couple hours on the Internets and found I could quite easily get at all this information on the LCD screen on the machine. The instructions to access the control menu are not given in the manual or by the greedy people who sell the machine, but fortunately other people have figured out these arcane secrets and shared them on the Internets.

I could also buy a SmartCard reader and load it into my computer to make fancy charts & graphs if I wanted to do that.

My numbers are all excellent so I lowered the pressure by two for a few days and then I lowered it again. So I have gone from 20 down to 16 and no ill effects. In fact, the drop in pressure means fewer annoying leaks around the mask and I don’t feel like I’m pumped full of air.

The units of pressure are weird too. They are measured in centimeters of water —— so my setting of 16 becomes about .27 PSI. I am still toying with the idea of getting the card reader but I don’t know if the information will be of any use without buying their expensive “medical grade” software which is close to $200 for the program. The data may be a simple database file or it may be encrypted. As long as my numbers continue to look good I probably won’t bother with it.

Added 04/09/09
I decided to try another air mask yesterday and went to visit my little girl “respiratory therapist”. We tried out a few masks again and I picked one that didn’t go so far up my face so it wouldn’t rub my nose so bad.

I couldn’t resist telling her my numbers were looking good and she immediately asked if I had downloaded the information to the chip and had the doctor’s office “interpret” them for me. I told her that I knew how to use the Clinical Menu and read it for myself.

I thought she was going to have kittens on the spot! She kept saying, “Oh, you are NOT supposed to do that!”