The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of South Korea announced their success in establishing the biological signal and general waveform compression (H.BWC) technology as a new international standard. This decision was officially approved in July 2026 through close collaboration between the Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
In this milestone achievement, the technology developed by ETRI was integrated into ITU-T Recommendation T.261 and MPEG-D Part 8. The South Korean research team not only contributed two core compression technologies to the standard, but was also entrusted as the editors of the standard document and led the entire standardization process at the global level.
The H.BWC technology is designed to efficiently compress various complex biological data, such as electroencephalograms (EEG) for brain activity, electrocardiograms (ECG) for heart rate, and electromyograms (EMG) for muscle activity. This high compression capability is expected to optimize storage capacity and accelerate the transmission of large-scale medical data across various healthcare facilities.
The implementation of this international standard is projected to have a widespread impact on the future digital healthcare ecosystem. This technology will become a crucial pillar in the development of telemedicine services, smart wearable health devices (wearables), and artificial intelligence (AI)-based medical diagnosis systems.
