What is a HealthVault Device?

The HealthVault Connection Center is built upon the Windows Portable Devices (WPD) technology that is used to connect cameras, media players, and cell phones to Windows.  With the release of HealthVault we’ve extended this architecture to support health and fitness devices.  The WPD technology is bus agnostic.  This means that it is completely independent of the connectivity mechanism used to connect the device to Windows.  As such it supports all connectivity mechanisms including USB 1.1, USB 2.0, Bluetooth, IR, Serial, etc.

The WPD model requires the installation of a User Mode driver.  A user mode driver is considerably easier to build than a kernel driver.  A user mode driver would be responsible for establishing a connection to the device from the PC, then respond to requests from the HealthVault Connection Center for data recorded on the device.  The primary responsibility of the driver is to map the proprietary device data types into HealthVault data types.  With this simple driver the health device can connect with the HealthVault Connection Center without any modification to the device firmware.

The following resources describe the WPD architecture in more detail.

High-level video discussion of the WPD technology at

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=234357#234357

MSDN contains the latest SDK information on WPD.  This design and programming guide describes development using the WPD API. 

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms740786.aspx

Windows Driver Development Kit describes how to build a WPD user mode driver, complete with documentation and samples. 

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKpkg.mspx

To learn about the WPD extensions for Health and Fitness devices you should download the HealthVault SDK.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/healthvault/default.aspx