Re:This is a nonstory (Score 2)

Disclosure: I am a doctor, and I work with patients with pacemakers on a frequent basis.

After reading your comments, if you were my doctor you'd be fired.

If he wants a raw printout of the data generated, he should make an appointment, stop by his cardiologist's office, and ask the cardiologist.

HIPAA guarantees my right to see and get copies of my health records. My interrogation reports are part of my records, I'm aware of that. (I have every single interrogation report ever since receiving the device in 2007.) I am not after printouts. That is not data. What I am after is the raw data collected remotely by the manufacturer of the device. Even doctors do not have access to the raw data. All doctors have access to are the reports. Although doctors have 24/7, unrestricted, and convenient access to reports online and on their mobile devices. At the very least, I want the same level of access my doctor has to my remote monitoring interrogations. End of story.

Most don't; it's several hundred small pages of gibberish to an untrained eye, linked together like the old dot matrix printer pages.

Now I'm actually thinking you're not a cardiac electrophysiologist. The reports are never "several hundred" pages long. The full interrogation report for an ICD is rarely longer than about two dozen 8½ x 11 pages. And whether it's gibberish to the untrained eye is besides the point.

If he feels uncomfortable with having a machine in his body that he can't check out himself every second of every day, he can ask to have it turned off ("turned off" being simplistic) or for a surgeon to remove it. [Insert belief system here] didn't give him the pacemaker growing in him when he was born - he can choose to use it as designed or choose not to use it, which is a valid choice.

So, it's your way or the highway? Sorry, no deal. I choose to have the device AND its data. The ICD works and is paid for 100%. All I'm missing is the data. Nothing about me without me.

There are real potential harms to widely propogating machines that could decrypt the data; the exact same machines allow us to reprogram the device, including settings that could harm or kill the patient. The encryption IS the security on implantable, reprogrammable medical devices

I am not asking for the wide propagation of machines to decrypt data. I'm asking for the raw data collected by the manufacturer. Also, there's currently no encryption in these devices, as demonstrated by Dr. Kevin Fu of UMASS in his research.