Structuring the e-SCP-ECG+ protocol for multi vital-sign handling

Standard Communication Protocol for Computer-assisted Electrocardiography (SCP-ECG) has been standardized in order different ECG devices to be able to communicate with computers through the same language. This paper proposes specific extensions on SCP-ECG protocol structure and introduces the enhanced SCP-ECG⁺ (e-SCP-ECG⁺) protocol. e-SCP-ECG⁺ is backward compatible to the SCP-ECG protocol while it is able to handle more vital sign and demographic data. It also overrides some limits of the original protocol. The proposed extension has been implemented both as new tags in existing sections and as new sections of the SCP-ECG protocol appended to the original file format.