TLDR: Potentially cracking proprietary medical software related to a holter EKG device and making it work for a more-than-average-Joe to hook up the device to himself and record and extract data whenever he wants.

I've had a medical condition in the category of cardiovascular diseases for around 10 years now. It's been a steady ride of finding out what the exact problem was and then treating it properly within a failing medical system.

One of the major flaws of the system is the ability to do holter EKG monitoring properly. Wearing a monitor costs money and you only have 24 hours of usage to try and "help" the device to register all the "anomalies" that occur during your daily life. Sadly, these artifacts are not a function that you can just call so that you may register them, these things may or may not happen today, or tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week. They are pretty random, and so this way most of the holter EKG records are straight up useless. I've spent months, if not a full year trying to hunt down some of the artifacts so that my GP and cardiologist can have a proper picture of what is actually going on, but have failed and failed because these things just pop up and can't wait for the next day or whatever the day that you make an appointment so that you can get the recorder on your person.

Thankfully, my bills are not as bad as they can be in the states, but people in the states have the shorter end of the stick - wearing a monitor can easily set you back $400, and doing longer recordings really affects your budget. Which is why I started looking into getting a device of my own.

The price of the device is not that bad - it costs around $2000 for a current generation top model from one of the leading Swiss manufacturers in the field. The problem with this idea is the software - the device uses proprietary software to work with the computer and extracting the data can be done with this and this software only. The software package contains a CD, licence card and a USB stick and needs an internet connection to work - I'm guessing that it communicates with the server to authenticate the session before it allows any of the records and results to be displayed. This proprietary software costs $5750-7500 and even more so in Europe - you could get a device software combo for $7500 in the states whereas this combo would set you back 10000€ in Europe and in my country a whopping 19000€ which is just insane.

So, I wanted to discuss the possibility of potentially acquiring this proprietary software and somehow distributing it to release groups who would look into cracking down this software package and making it a widely distributed thing so than anyone with the device can interact with it and get their recorded data. I know this post may seem unreasonably utopian, but the actual benefits would be tremendous - it's not about just saving money, it's mostly about being able to hook up the device to your body whenever you feel that that particular recording would be useful to your doctor, and that it would amp up the chances of presenting your doctor to the most accurate data.

What are your thoughts about this and how do you feel about me pursuing this goal?

//I may make edits because I'm writing from my mobile phone