Dumping data out of medical devices, of late, has become a topic that might be of interest to this community. In general, the law requires that a patient be ab

Dumping data out of medical devices, of late, has become a topic that might be of interest to this community. In general, the law requires that a patient be able to access all the medical data that they generate; it's part of their health record, and (with very few exceptions) they have a right to know the contents of it. Unfortunately, as patients begin automatically generating data -- for instance, pacemakers that automatically dump ECG data to a doctor's office, or implantable neurostimulators that automatically dump EEG data -- there have been real concerns lately over whether they can access the data in a standardized format (or, in reality, whether they can access it at all!). Companies have been somewhat reticent to give patients access to what they perceive as proprietary machine learning data that their device has collected. Hugh Campos discusses this in a talk he gave at one point: http://boingboing.net/2012/09/28/why-cant-pacemaker-users-rea.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/28/why-cant-pacemaker-users-re... It would be interesting to know if patients have access to implanted EEG data (perhaps they could use it to measure sleep, if they could access it?). They should, but I'm not holding out hope.