There is currently no widely adopted, interoperable standard for the efficient compression, storage, and exchange of biomedical waveform signals such as electrocardiography (ECG), electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and related multi-channel waveform data. Existing solutions are often proprietary and can limit interoperability, data sharing, and long-term accessibility. This Recommendation | International Standard specifies an interoperable format for efficient compression, transmission, and storage of digital waveform signals, including biomedical waveform signals such as electrocardiography (ECG), electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and photoplethysmogram (PPG) data, as well as other types of general waveform data. It supports various bit depths, a broad range of sampling rates, and large numbers of channels, as required by a range of biomedical and general signal processing applications. The Specification provides for lossy, near-lossless, and lossless compression, and includes features such as optimized data blocking, indexing for rapid access, independent channel decoding, and metadata support. T.261 was developed collaboratively with ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, Subcommittee SC 29, Coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information, and corresponds with the first edition of ISO/IEC 23003-8 (Information technology — MPEG audio technologies — Part 8: Biomedical and general waveform signal coding) as technically aligned twin text.

Stage: ISO/IEC NP 23003-8 (2025-10)