Abstract :
All medical applications include a measurement component connected to the acquisition, correction, and validation of the medical data. Medical measurements have to deal with the measurand variability, both over time and between patients, being caused by a multitude of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, some known and some unknown. The goal of the Technical Committee on Biological and Medical Measurements (TC-25) is to establish, develop, promote, and support the cooperation among researchers involved in the different fields of medical measurements, so that instrumentation and measurement, medical and biological fields all become highly aware of these problems. In this effort, the Committee promoted the development of the P1721 draft standard on "Objective Measurement of Systemic Arterial Blood Pressure in Humans," which is now on the way for the first ballot. This is an example of fruitful cooperation within the medical field: blood pressure was measured in an empirical way since 1905, and the instrumentation and measurement field aimed at understanding its reliability, i.e., the uncertainty, of the blood pressure measurement.
