CPAP - Medical treatment compliance

Among the many things that makes it difficult to classify medicine as a science is the fact that many, if not most, medical treatments rely on patient compliance and have no trustworthy method for determining compliance level let alone enforcing compliance. Certainly there is the assumption that the patient will comply to achieve the maximum benefit or at least "get their money's worth".  But compliance is also affected by unpleasantness  of the treatment, loss of instructions or lack of understanding, embarrassment, non-belief or non-acceptance of the treatment, past experience or even hostility toward the practitioner, and just plain orneriness.

An example might be the respirator or CPAP machine I am currently using since I apparently have a severe case of sleep apnea.  Although I'm supposed to use the CPAP every night from the time I go to sleep until I get out of bed in the morning.  But I might take off the mask to go to the bathroom and forget to put it back on.  In the morning it might not remember anything about the incident.

My CPAP takes care of such problems and maintains a record of several key measurements allowing me or my treatment team to chart my progress or decline.  The simple top of machine readout gives an average for the past 7 days and past 25 days of the following: Therapy Hours; Days when therapy has exceeded 4 hours; Large leakage in the system; AHI (Apnea-Hypnopnea Index); Periodic breathing percentage; and 90% Pressure level.  There is a program costing $150 which will download data from the machine and produce reports like a real scientist would need. I feel that just tracking the read-out numbers would give a great amount of data.

The data is not only available in the readout window but also on an SD memory chip.  I would have appreciated having some instruction about logging this data or taking the memory chip in to the hospital for some analysis.  I'm concerned about whether I'm making any progress on the machine or even if I'm really using it right.