Advice: Designing or adapting an open-source software that will read CTG results

[White Tulip]

Hi!
I was thinking of designing or adapting an open-source software that will read CTG results. CTG (cardiotography) is a machine designed to read fetal heart rate and give results in a graph format. Currently in most developing countries like mine, we use CTG that produces results/graphs in a paper. Now I want to change this like most developed country's CTG that give results/graphs in a computer.I believe that by doing this, it will increase the efficiency of fetal heart rate monitoring and interpretation.
I know Google is a wealth of information, but I have literally no idea what I actually should be reading to start with, and have no idea how to separate out the wheat from the chaff. I'll be happy to receive ideas and further options that may help solving this problem.

[Nepomuk]

Hi White Tulip and welcome to bytes.com!

That certainly sounds like a worth while idea. And getting started can indeed be difficult but don't let that stop you.

First of all, you have to know how to get the results and which format they come in. Can you connect the CTG reader to a computer without hardware changes? Are there drivers available to get the information once the device is connected? If so, how can you programmatically access the data output by the system?

In many cases where the device can be directly connected to a computer, the manufacturer will offer some way to programatically access the data. This depends on the device of course, so gather that information. Once you know how to get the data the next step is to find or create a program that will do so. But that's a whole different issue, so once you have found that information we'll see what to do next. :-)

[weaknessforcats]

You will need a team to make this work.

First, you need a customer who will actually use this product. It may be the customer is you but I can't tell. It is the customer who defines the requirements to be implemented in the product. This person needs to certify the product works.

Second, you need a SME (subject-matter-expert). This person knows enough to communicate with the customer and also enough to communicate with the software developer.

Third, you need the actual software developer. You may think freebie code will work, but I doubt it. I expect any freebie code will need to be modified before it can work for you. This developer should be talking to the SME and not to the customer simply because software developers have a language of their own that is not easily understood by a customer.

Fourth, you will need a project manager to coordinate the activities so the only work that is done is the work needed to be done.

Then you need to consider how to pay for all this. Everybody works for free?

You will find the smallest amount of effort you will spend is in the software coding process because nothing will happen until the developer understands what to do.

[White Tulip]

Thank you Nepomuk,
I've been thinking of what you've told me, and I'm still studying and trying to understand how these CTG works. But on research I came up with an idea that machines which produce results on paper are analog machines. So need to intercept their analog signals, and sample them at an appropriate frequency with an analog-digital-converter. This really seems difficult as you said, way too more than I imagined. But still I need to learn and understand how I can solve this.