IEEE Announces IT Healthcare Standard and New Projects in Advance of the IEEE Annual International Conference of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC ’17)

PISCATAWAY, NEW JERSEY, USA, 29 June 2017 – IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, and the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA), today announced the availability of IEEE 11073-20702™—Health informatics: Point-of-Care Medical Device Communication—Standard for Medical Devices Communication Profile for Web Services in advance of the upcoming EMBC ’17 to be held 11-15 July at the International Convention Center on JeJu Island, South Korea. IEEE also announced the approval of two new healthcare-related standards projects: IEEE P1708™—Standard for Wearable Cuffless Blood Pressure Measuring Devices, and IEEE P1752™—Standard for Mobile Health Data.

Sponsored by the IEEE 11073™ Standards Committee (EMB/11073), IEEE 11073 family of standards are utilized to structure data and enable data transmission across multiple healthcare devices, ensuring effective interoperability and communication between medical, health care and wellness devices, as well as with external computer systems. IEEE 11073-20702 defines a communication protocol specification for a distributed system of point-of-care (PoC) medical devices and medical IT systems that need to exchange data, or safely control networked PoC medical devices, by profiling Web Service specifications.

“IEEE 11073-20702 is the first standard that streamlines the integration of medical devices with the IP stack common to IT specialists around the world,” said Bill Ash, strategic technology program director, IEEE SA. “Ensuring the safe and secure transmission of healthcare data is essential to advance value-based healthcare, giving patients easy access to their medical information and simplifying IT processes for point-of-care facilities.”

The IEEE EMB Standards Committee (EMB/ Stds Com) is the technical sponsor for all the other standardization development projects.

IEEE P1708 is working to establish guidelines in a standardized way for manufacturers to qualify and validate their products, potential purchasers or users to evaluate and select prospective products, and health care professionals to understand the manufacturing practices on wearable, cuffless blood pressure (BP) devices. The intent is to establish objective performance evaluation of wearable, cuffless BP measuring devices and may be applied for all types of wearable BP measurement devices, regardless of their modes of operation (e.g., to measure short-term, long-term, snapshot, continuous, beat(s)-to-beat(s) BP, or BP variability). The standard is independent of the form of the device or the vehicle to which the device is attached or in which it is embedded.

IEEE P1752 is intended to provide meaningful description, exchange, sharing, and use of mobile health data to support analysis for a set of consumer health, biomedical research, and clinical care needs. The standard will leverage data and nomenclature standards such as the IEEE 11073 family of standards for personal health devices as references, defining specifications for a mobile health data applications programming interface (API) and standardized representations for mobile health data and metadata. Furthermore, IEEE SA is active on many eHealth related projects, including four standards in development addressing medical 3D printing undertaken by the IEEE 3333.2™ working group.

“The IEEE EMBS members are highly committed, informed, and innovative biomedical engineers from around the world dedicated to finding new discoveries that can advance biomedical technologies through collaboration and translational engineering into product realization in the market place,” said Carole Carey, chair, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Standards Committee. “With the significant growth in the development and innovation of new technologies being applied to health and healthcare systems, the need for developing consensus standards in an open and global environment is essential. EMBS is pleased to host its 39^th Annual International Conference, where IEEE EMBS has assembled an extensive agenda and a prestigious list of keynote speakers for sharing best practices and discovery to meet the technological challenges today and for the future.”

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