ResPlus CPAP

[AW333]

Does OSCAR support the ResPlus CPAP? The ResPlus uses a file format of vhth, does anyone know what type of data that is? Has anyone seen or used their software vhealth? I would like to know before committing to getting this unit.

Thanks for your support

[pholynyk]

OSCAR does not currently support the ResPlus CPAP machine, and is unlikely to in the future, given the size of the OSCAR team.

[AW333]

Thanks for the quick response, however how does team size affect the support? Which parameters dictate the support possible? Is the limiting factor finding out the file format?

[SuperSleeper]

Thanks for the quick response, however how does team size affect the support? Which parameters dictate the support possible? Is the limiting factor finding out the file format?

The OSCAR team is a rather small group of part-time, unpaid open-source developers.  They don't code for OSCAR as their main occupation- they have lives and jobs outside of Apnea Board & OSCAR of course.  The project is not like a proprietary project created by a major company (ResMed or Phillips for instance) - those companies have very large budgets to hire full-time developers.  OSCAR has a yearly budget of $0.00.  The expense of hosting, file storage, bandwidth and using the forums and Mantis software for dev work is solely funded by Apnea Board, which itself has a very small budget based upon member donations and a small amount of Google ad revenue.

So, given these limited resources, developers must prioritize development efforts to help the greatest number of patients first.  There are an estimated 10 million CPAP machines sold globally each year, and that number is growing.  As an example, it makes sense to work on supporting machines from a company that sells 1,000,000 units every year before supporting machines from a small company that only sells 5,000 units a year.  Just like a medical facility has to "triage" their patients, the same type of prioritizing must go into a development project like OSCAR.

That may sound "unfair" to some, but developers must use logic and common sense to prioritize what specific machines they're working to support.  It's a matter of hundreds of hours in some cases, and there are thousands of the various CPAP models out there, making it impossible to support every single model out there.  But they are trying to help as many people as possible as best they can.  

As to the difficulty in figuring out the file format for an unsupported machine, many times it depends upon how the machine manufacturers have easily-understandable file formats.  For more info, I'll leave that to an OSCAR developer to explain, but keep in mind the whole OSCAR project is very limited in manpower.

This Software Support forum is good for doing what you have done-- communicating with developers to ask that a specific machine be supported by OSCAR.  But, reality in how many people use a specific machine plays a major part in their decision process as well.  Personally, this is one reason why I will always use a CPAP machine from one of the companies OSCAR already supports.  I'd suggest that to others as well, if they have a choice.

[Lucid]

Hi, AW333  Here's more information on which devices OSCAR supports:

http://www.apneaboard.com/wiki/index.php...d_machines