A general-purpose representation of biosignal data based on MFER and CDA

Electric mechanical or chemical signals of biological origin delivered by human bodies can always be of interest for diagnosis, patient monitoring, and biomedical research. Such biomedical signals, namely biosignals, are usually presented by flat file format or proprietary format when digitized for acquisition, storage, transfer and analysis. Recent advances in the ubiquitous computing technology make it possible to measure biosignal data anywhere and anytime. But a big challenge resides in the realm of ubiquitous computing, which is the uniform integration and communication of data. This problem also exists in the development of the electronic health record and telemedicine. Standardizing the data presentation is the best solution to resolve these problems. But a general-purpose, effective, user-friendly, and universally accepted data format for biosignal is not available at this moment. This paper proposes a simple and complete representation of biosignal data based on MFER and CDA. It adopts frame structure of MFER to encode the waveform data of biosignal and uses hierarchical structure of CDA to describe its non-waveform data. This composite format not only inherits the advantages of MFER and CDA, but also facilitates the implementation of interpretation of biosignal.