Standalone EKGs are EKG machines that do not need to connect to any other device to work. They have built in thermal printers and will print out a report at the end of the test. This is what most of you are used to. Some standalone machines can still connect to computers, EMRs, and networks but do not NEED to in order to operate. This is opposed by the computer based EKG that requires a laptop in order to run the program.