A dongle is provided that can be plugged into the micro-USB port of a mobile device that supports USB host mode. The dongle provides control of the radio circuitry housed within the dongle to applications running on a smartphone. The dongle is highly miniaturized, providing a small form factor that is useful to hardware manufacturers that want to move away from using Bluetooth, while enhancing aesthetics and practicality. The dongle enables high data rate devices such as medical, diagnostic, and physiological sensing devices, to realize significant energy savings, facilitating greater miniaturization, and increased consumer adoption. Also, the dongle allows manufacturers of these types of devices to avoid dealing with the overhead and complexity of large-scale mesh networking imposed by protocols governed by large consortiums, such as Bluetooth.