Personal Healthcare Device Class

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Sept 29, 2015

This section describes the Personal Healthcare Device Class (PHDC) supported by μC/USB-Device. The implementation offered refers to the following USB-IF specification:

  • USB Device Class Definition for Personal Healthcare Devices, release 1.0, Nov. 8 2007.

PHDC allows you to build USB devices that are meant to be used to monitor and improve personal healthcare. Lots of modern personal healthcare devices have arrived on the market in recent years. Glucose meter, pulse oximeter and blood-pressure monitor are some examples. A characteristic of these devices is that they can be connected to a computer for playback, live monitoring or configuration. One of the typical ways to connect these devices to a computer is by using a USB connection, and that’s why PHDC has been developed.

Although PHDC is a standard, most modern Operating Systems (OS) do not provide any specific driver for this class. When working with Microsoft Windows®, developers can use the WinUsb driver provided by Microsoft to create their own driver. The Continua Health Alliance also provides an example of a PHDC driver based on libusb (an open source USB library, for more information, see http://www.libusb.org/). This example driver is part of the Vendor Assisted Source-Code (VASC).