Work for a new European Standard on Biosignal Storage Format beginsA workshop was arranged in Frankfurt on 15 March presenting how the European health informatics standards are prepared, what standardisation activities exists in the biosignal and biomedical measurement field and the introduction of a new work item on a biosignal file exchange format standard that was launched by CEN/TC251/ WGIV. A further aim was to invite interested manufacturers of biomedical measurement devices and other organisations to participate and influence this work. This informal workshop was organised by the active members of CEN/TC251/ WGIV. The need to exchange physiological signal and other physiological measurement data between computer systems has increased during the past few years as more and more measurements end up in digital form. The first exchange parties have been researchers who have needed the possibility to collect data from different laboratories to increase their sample sizes and to learn from each others' recordings. The expansive use of telemedicine in such areas of medicine where digital recordings are made is based on the assumption that the receiver of the data can view and process the data. At present this is only possible between laboratories which use equipment of the same manufacturer or some agreed interchange format which has required programming skills in order to make the conversion programs. The purpose of this standard is to define a standard file exhange format which, when implemented by many manufacturers, solves the data interchange problem. Application areas of the format range from intensive care units to sleep laboratories and epilepsy monitoring. This project which began in May 1994, is supported by CEN/ TC251/WGIV and it is continuation for the work item Vital Signs Information Representation elaborated by CEN/TC251/PT5-021. It began by making a survey of earlier data formats none of which had not, however, the characteristics of becoming the standard format as such. The present version of the draft can be downloaded via ftp from ftp://sigftp.cs.tut.fi/pub/eeg-data/ standards/cenf060.zip which contains a MS-Word 6.0 document compressed with PKZIP. An important part of the document is Annex A which contains the codes for the signals, measurements, body sites and events to be stored by the format. New comments about the format can be sent to and more information can be obtained by email from: Alpo Värri, Tampere, Finland Dr. Alpo Värri
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