USB Brings Cost and Connectivity Advantages to Imaging
USB is the most prevalent method to connect computers and peripheral devices. Taking a survey of my desk there are a multitude of devices—a smartphone, headphones, a camera, mouse and keyboard—that rely on a USB connection.
Thanks in large part to its ease of use, USB dominates consumer-to-computer connectivity applications and is being rapidly adopted across other markets. For example, home-based medical devices that track general health, or more complex systems that monitor a patient’s response to therapy, benefit from the plug-and-play simplicity of USB.
Often these products store data in memory until they are plugged into a PC. Data can be analyzed locally—a fitness tracker shames us into moving more—or is transferred to a physician’s office for evaluation. For the majority of these applications, USB is a simple method to support the bandwidth required to transmit data-intense information. However, there’s no real-time requirement for data delivery. The few seconds it takes to transmit data from the device to the computer doesn’t impact a patient’s or physician’s ability to monitor health or a response to treatment.