Standards Committee Report

Robert Munzner, Chair and IEEE Standards Board Liaison

Active Members:

Guy Hammer, Vice Chair
Carole Carey, Secretary
Rory Cooper, ANSI/ISO Liaison
Steli Loznen, IEC/TC62 Liaison
Gideon Kantor
Arthur Sherwood
Alvin Wald

Summary of Committee Activities

All committee business is presently being conducted by E-mail representation, using a reflector list (EmbStdCom@ieee.org) on the IEEE server.

A public web site (https://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/embs/embs_standards) is being maintained that lists standards and standards projects directly applicable to medical devices and the biological effects of energy; however, there is no longer a link from the EMBS home.

The committee is maintaining liaison with ANSI, ISO/CEN/TC293, IEC/TC62, and the IEEE Standards Board. The liaison activities of Carole Carey and Steli Loznen this year are given in the spring AdCom report. A report of the IEEE Standards Board activities is provided to the EMBS President, to the Vice President and to the EMBS Standards Committee members on a regular (quarterly) basis.

IEEE Standards Board Meetings

The Board and its committees met March 15-17 in Hilton Head, South Carolina, June 12-4 in Piscataway, New Jersey, and were scheduled to meet September 11-13 in Piscataway. The latter meeting was canceled because of travel difficulties. The EMBS liaison is a voting member of the Board for the year 2001 and has attended all meetings. The next meeting will be December 4-6 in New York City.

The name of the "Medical Information Bus (MIB) Committee" has been changed to the "EMBS-1073 Committee". The EMBS president asked that the chair of this committee, which is sponsored by EMBS, report to EMBS AdCom through the EMBS Standards Committee in the future, and the chair, Robert Kennelly, agreed.

EMBS-1073

This committee continues to develop an extensive series of standards, the scope of which is "to provide for open systems communications in health care applications, primarily between bedside medical devices and patient care information systems, optimized for the acute care setting." The IEEE 1073 working group chair is Todd Cooper (t.cooper@ieee.org). Detailed information about this committee's activities is provided on the web site https://IEEE1073.org. Many parts of this standard have been approved by IEEE and published over the past several years. During the past year the Standards Board has approved several revised project authorization requests (PARS) to enable the 1073 standards to be harmonized with ISO format requirements.

Budget

The committee requested the sum of $1200 for the year and this support was provided by EMBS. All Standards Board meetings are scheduled to be held in the United States during 2002 and the committee requests a budget of $1200 for next year to help defray the cost of meeting attendance.

Future Activities

As noted above, the committee's web site is no longer linked to the EMBS site. Does AdCom wish the committee to continue to maintain this site as a public service?

The Committee intends to sponsor a project to obtain IEEE adoption of the ANSI/RESNA Wheelchair Standard under the leadership of Rory Cooper. We hope to have this project authorized by IEEE soon.

Respectfully submitted,

Robert F. Munzner, Ph.D.
October 2001