got a new seat post, took off the old saddle, saddle rail snapped.

so had to buy a new saddle as well.

not my day.

Nah, I've wasted a lot of time today trying to get some software working. Very annoying, it used to work but I hadn't used it for a few months. Gited it up today and I got the message that an update was available. Fatal mistake.....

Trouble is, the software controlled a USB device and during the process managed to lose all the data on the device. So that is everything since I last connected....

which is a PITA.

There could be a serious opportunity here though, this particular genre of product (healthcare), the connections to a computer are total rubbish. They're crying out for some slick software to import data easily. I need to think about this a bit.

But I wonder if I could do something in software, for existing hardware?

@PeteH Medical device software is uniformly terrible in my experience.

Part of the problem is that it takes forever for the software and hardware to get validated and approved by medical regulators (i.e. the FDA in the US).

@nhinkle yes, certainly there is very little selection. In terms of "hardware that will connect to other things". I wanted some kind of health suite on the computer that would just suck data in.

But my general impression is that the health companies can't be bothered producing the functionality

Why make something good when you can make something bad and still get paid big bucks, right?

funny thing is, my doctor looks at me as though I'm mad when I say to him, I just want to measure this data and have it all recorded automatically. I think it is a cultural thing.

I got a Glucometer and a Bloop Pressure Monitor a couple of months back, I just want to connect the things to a PC and have the data stored so I can analyse it later.

I mean, the analysis is one thing, and that requires interaction with people to see what kind of reports would be useful. But the data capture/transfer/storage side of things should be trivial

Maybe we're just spoilt these days, with people like Garmin expending a lot of effort in this area. It is certainly easy to get my rides into Connect.

I often thought, btw, that a great area for Garmin to expand into would be personal healthcare devices. But I can see that getting approval from e.g. the FDA might be an obstacle.

But people are thinking along those lines. Did you know Microsoft has a "Healthvault" cloud service, which theoretically is the (your) central repository for your health data? I mean, I think there are big issues of trust, but just thinking technically...

Garmin wouldn't even need to manufacture anything, after all there are the ANT+ scales by Tanita, which can boogie with verious Garmin devices and can be stored/displayed by Garmin Connect. Imagine an ANT+ glucometer.

Bluetooth Blood Pressure Monitors already exist (but obviously with crappy connectivity and likely some proprietary data format)

But admittedly the "health" side of Garmin Connect is pretty rubbish right now

I wonder if Strava has any connectivity to health devices?

Watched the film "The Green Mile" when it first came out in 1999, it was so powerful I could never watch it again. Just watching it for the second time tonight.