MEDWEAR

About MEDWEAR

Community-driven standards for wearable health data

About the Project

Wearable devices are rapidly transforming healthcare by enabling continuous, real-time monitoring of patients outside clinical settings. MEDWEAR is a community-driven initiative partially funded by the Open Research Data program of the ETH Board and the Schweizer Paraplegiker Stiftung, aimed at creating open standards for structuring and exchanging high-frequency data from medical wearables.

We address the fragmentation of the digital health ecosystem by building on existing standards - Open mHealth, HL7 FHIR, IEEE 11073, and openEHR - to define lightweight, extensible schemas suitable for modern sensing devices and middleware systems like ROS 2 and MQTT.

Why Standardization Matters

Although wearable technologies have become integral to modern healthcare - supporting use cases from chronic disease management to preventive care - the lack of common data formats hinders integration with EHRs, AI systems, and clinical decision tools. Over 80% of healthcare data remains unstructured and difficult to reuse.

Standardizing wearable data supports interoperability, clinical utility, patient safety, and research reproducibility. MEDWEAR provides schemas and APIs that support high-frequency data, real-time streaming, and device-agnostic modeling.

Key challenges addressed

  • Fragmented systems with incompatible data formats
  • Lack of EHR integration
  • Data privacy and regulatory constraints
  • Barriers to real-time, high-frequency data streaming
  • Limited clinical adoption and ROI evidence

Standards & Design Principles

MEDWEAR schemas follow the IEEE 1752-2021 Standard and are compatible with the Open mHealth framework, extending both to support high-frequency raw sensor streams.

  • Vendor-agnostic - no dependency on proprietary device formats.
  • FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
  • Modular - signal schemas are self-contained and composable.
  • Middleware-ready - definitions ship as both JSON Schemas and ROS 2 .msg files.
  • Extensible - new signal types can be added without breaking existing consumers.

Relationship to existing standards

Standard Scope MEDWEAR relationship
Open mHealth Structured JSON schemas for health data Base schema format; MEDWEAR extends it for raw, high-frequency signals
IEEE 1752.1-2021 Mobile health data quality and interoperability Normative reference for schema design and quality requirements
HL7 FHIR Clinical data exchange (EHR integration) Target interoperability layer for clinical deployment
openEHR Semantic clinical models Reference for clinical semantic precision
IEEE 11073-PHD Personal health device communication Informs device-level metadata modeling

Collaborating Institutions

  • ETH Zurich — Open Research Data Program of the ETH Board
  • SCAI Lab, ETH Zurich
  • DART Lab, Lake Lucerne Institute
  • Schweizer Paraplegiker Stiftung (SPS)
  • University of Zurich (UZH)
  • SUPSI

Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by the Open Research Data program of the ETH Board, and Schweizer Paraplegiker Stiftung (2021-HS-348) within the Digital Transformation in Personalized Healthcare in SCI.