Opinion Software Freedom Conservancy's (SFC) Executive Director Karen Sandler was last year awarded an honorary doctorate by Germany's Katholieke Universiteit Leuven for her work for open source and software freedom.
There was only one problem. Her heart was beating strangely, and she couldn't get the data out of her implanted pacemaker/defibrillator proprietary software to find out what was going on.
She was forced to make a life-or-death decision that would have been much easier were it not for proprietary software being the only option for heart devices. Sandler ended up going, and all went well. It easily could have gone terribly wrong.
You see, Sandler has a heart condition, Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). It's a condition that generally has no discernible symptoms unless it kills you. A serious thing.
This time, however, she had a symptom, an irregular heartbeat, that was getting worse. Clearly, the first thing to do was pull the data from the device so that her cardiologist would have more data for the treatment.
One of the reasons why people get these devices is so they and their doctor can track their condition. So it was easy right? Wrong.
Remember, this runs proprietary software. It turned out that no one but a company representative could pull data from it. And, no one - and I mean no one - was available who could get the information.
This is not a rare problem. Sandler, aka the cyborg lawyer, has been following the use of proprietary software in medical devices for years. It's an ugly picture.
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