ITU has approved a new protocol to relay biometric information, connecting medical practitioners with the real-time medical data of patients in remote locations. Study Group 17’s Recommendation ITU-T X.1080.1 is the first in a suite of e-health and telemedicine recommendations and supports interactions between a patient’s local medical facility and a remote medical centre.

e-Health technologies have great potential to bridge the service provision inequalities between developed and developing nations, as well as between urban and rural communities. ITU-T X.1080.1 takes into account work in other standards bodies and recognizes and identifies data formats and interactions using Abstract Notation One (ASN.1) object identifiers (OIDs and OID-IRIs). It also provides security features in the form of Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS), which enables both integrity and encryption.

ITU-T X.1080.1 is designed to provide wide-area communication supporting all health-related activities, where the communication can be usefully undertaken as structured messages. From this base, the X.1080 series will develop into a set of recommendations addressing physical, chemical, biological, culturological and psychological diagnoses, interventions and prescriptions. It aims to remove the need for a co-location of medical practitioners and patients, and will support both multi-party (for audit and training purposes) and one-to-one interaction.

The remaining five parts of the X.1080 series, dealing with the identification of physiological quantities and units, are being constructed in close collaboration with ISO/TC 12, and IEC/TC 25.