Abstract: In general, this disclosure describes techniques for remotely monitoring the health of an ambulatory patient. As described herein, an ambulatory patient may interact with a monitoring device that is located at the patient's home. The monitoring device may prompt the patient to provide responses to health-related questions or requests for physiological characteristics and may upload the responses. A health care professional may then use the responses to evaluate the health of the patient. A set of firmware instructions stored on the monitoring device may cause the monitoring device to perform these functions. These firmware instructions remain the same even when the monitoring device downloads new prompts.