Chapter
11
Personal Healthcare Device Class
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).
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