Overview
ISO/TS 23541-2:2025 – "Health informatics - Categorial structure for representation of 3D human body position system - Part 2: Body movement" – provides a foundation for the representation and coordination of human body movement terminology and 3D body movement data within health informatics. This technical specification defines key terminological concepts, categories, and the relationships required to align time-dependent 3D body movements with conventional text-based healthcare terminology.
By establishing a categorial structure for body movement, the standard advances interoperability and semantic consistency between creators and users of medical 3D animations. It enables more accurate documentation, communication, and quantitative analysis of human movement in healthcare, particularly for clinical assessment, patient education, and health research.
Key Topics
- Terminological Framework: Defines key concepts such as 3D body movement, 3D animation, anatomical site, action, intervention, observation, and finding.
- Categorial Structure: Outlines the semantic categories central to describing dynamic body movements, including:
- 3D body part, 3D body site, and 3D object
- 3D actor and 3D annotation models
- Action, action segment, and timeline
- Semantic Links: Identifies and formalizes relationships between terminological concepts and 3D data using links such as:
- hasDescription: Connects an action to its text-based description
- hasAnnotation: Relates action segments to explanatory 3D annotations
- hasModel: Binds text-based descriptions to 3D actor models
- hasAction: Associates a 3D body or actor with specific movement actions
- hasActor: Links 3D models to the performances of body movement
- hasObservation: Connects action segments to measurable clinical observations
- hasFinding: Relates movement segments to clinical assessments
- hasIntervention: Connects segments to healthcare interventions
- hasSegment: Segments actions over a timeline for finer granularity
- Scope and Exclusions: Focuses on the conceptual and categorial aspects and does not address graphical user interfaces, specific data structures, or implementation details for 3D systems.
Applications
ISO/TS 23541-2:2025 enhances the precision and standardization of medical information in a variety of applications:
- Clinical Documentation: Enables detailed, terminologically coordinated records of patient movement, supporting objective assessments and longitudinal analysis.
- 3D Medical Animation Development: Offers a standardized way to describe and exchange 3D body movements, ensuring animations are semantically aligned with healthcare terminology.
- Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for Healthcare: Facilitates the integration of standardized 3D models and actions in immersive health applications, from patient education to rehabilitation.
- Movement Disorders Assessment: Supports professionals in analyzing and quantifying patient movements (e.g., gait analysis in Parkinson’s disease) with precise, time-segmented annotation.
- Medical Research: Promotes consistent terminology and structure in research data, improving comparability and the ability to conduct meta-analyses on 3D movement data.
- Interoperability: Enables systems using 3D movement data to communicate reliably using shared, text-based medical terminology.
Related Standards
ISO/TS 23541-2:2025 is part of a series designed to support comprehensive representation of the human body and its movement in health informatics. Related standards include:
- ISO/TS 23541-1: Health informatics - Categorial structure for representation of 3D human body position system - Part 1: Bones
- ISO 1087:2019: Terminology work and terminology science
- ISO 9241 Series: Ergonomics of human-system interaction (relevant parts on gesture interactions and biomedical effects)
- ISO/IEC 14496-16: Coding of audio-visual objects, particularly for 3D animation frameworks
- ISO/IEC 19774-1: Humanoid animation (HAnim) architecture
- IEEE STD 3333.2.1: IEEE Recommended practice for 3D medical modeling
By adhering to ISO/TS 23541-2:2025, healthcare organizations, developers, and researchers can ensure clear, consistent, and interoperable representation of 3D human body movement data, fostering better clinical outcomes and more robust health informatics systems.