While this sort of policy has its place, like for stopping people overriding their morphine machine to skip its limit, I honestly don't see the problem for things like this, primarily diagnostic based equipment.

I wonder if there might be a market for open source medical hardware with open source software to go with it. This could provide people with a very inexpensive option to look after themselves and also by perhaps uploading their data anonymously to an open database, help others too in diagnosing their problems too.

Obviously you when you get into things like this people get a bit scared because the medical industry is proprietary by nature which makes it scary because you don't want to mess with something you are told to go to a professional about, I think ubiuiquity might solve the problem. The more information out there, the more people are educated and the less scared they are.