View of headquarters of Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon (Yonhap News)

By Koh Hyunjeong

A domestically developed core technology for biosignal compression is now an international standard.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in Daejeon on July 29 said its proprietary technology was officially incorporated into the global standard for biological and general waveform compression (H.BWC), which is under joint development by the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) under the International Organization for Standardization.

The standard was approved in July last year as both ITU-T Recommendation T.261 and MPEG-D Part 8.

ETRI incorporated two core compression technologies in the standard, served as the editor of the standard documents and led the international standardization process.

H.BWC is a technology that efficiently compresses biosignals such as electroencephalograms, electrocardiograms and electromyograms, as well as general waveform data without no loss of any original information.

The adoption of the standard is expected to boost the efficiency of storage and transmission of large volumes of biosignal data at medical institutions.

The technology will also see wide applications in digital healthcare including telemedicine, wearable devices and artificial intelligence-based diagnostics.

hjkoh@korea.kr