Thanks for the replies guys. Ideally the object would be something about the size of a Rubiks cube. I'm trying to avoid having the patient have to power up a PC each time they need to do their exercises.
Never thought about iPods / iPhones, they run excel, I shall look into that.
MikMo, thanks for the GoBetwino program! The SD card method I'm vaguely aware of, I see there are a number of forum topics on this already so I shall go read those, such as these:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1206874649/8
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/ExtendedDatabaseLibrary