The software that gets installed on your PC consists of two programs: SpO2 Manager and SpO2 Review.
SpO2 Manager is the real time display and recording program. The program is able to display real time data for 4 patients simultaneously - presumably by connecting 4 sensors to the PC at once. Patient windows can be drug around and rearranged if needed. Double clicking on the active window (or any window) will blow it up to fill the entire window alone. This is probably the first thing you will do if you only have one sensor connected. Window displays can also be selected via icons at the bottom of the screen. The SpO2 manager screen shows a running trend graph of both pulse rate and SpO2 saturation levels. That graph takes up a little over half the screen. The window period of this trend graph can be set to 1min, 10min, 30min, or 60 minutes.
Below the running trend graph is a real time display of your pulse in a classic medical oscilloscope format (very cool).
Along the right side of the screen is a numeric readout of your pulse rate in BPM and your SpO2 percentage. In the bottom right corner is some eye candy consisting of a little heart beating and a pulsing bar graph.
The bottom of the screen has several other control buttons (in addition to the patient window selection icons already mentioned). The "i" control button is for entering patient information in the currently selected window (if active). There is a language selection pull-down, and also a printer button - for report generation, that will be described below.
Alarm levels can be set by right clicking in the units area on the left or right hand side of the running trend graph area. These are visual alarms only - no sound options that I could find.
Recording data:
Recording of data begins as soon as SpO2 manager starts. For this reason, I prefer to have the sensor attached and secured to my finger before I start the program. The preferred method for storing data when your session is over is to unplug the USB cable. When unplugging the sensor, the program will prompt you to enter the patient information once more if you forgot to enter it earlier. It will then auto-generate a file name (changeable) and will save three data files. The binary data file has an .spo extension. This is the file that can be loaded into SpO2 Review which will be described next. Also saved are two .csv files that can be loaded into MS excel for plotting. One of the .csv files contains the data for the trend graph, the other file (which tends to be huge) is the pulse trace data. An 8.5 hour session generated an .spo file that was only 150kb in size. Here is a screenshot of SpO2 manager running on my computer.