The BP monitor is capable of reading systolic and diastolic pressure as well as heart rate using an arm cuff. It can store up to 48 readings as well as the time and date of each reading. The limited storage and the lack of connectivity to a computer have made it necessary to modify (i.e., hack) it.  

The main modification consists of bypassing the memory chip of the device in order to enable storing the data in a database residing on a personal computer. Concretely, the memory chip of the device was taken off-line and emulated with the help of an Arduino Duemilanove conected to a computer, via a USB port. The Arduino contains specially designed software that emulates the functions of the original memory chip. In addition, the Arduino communicates all memory access requests and data to the PC running the Health Monitoring application and database.