Within the context of the ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards for device communication, this standard establishes a normative definition of the communication between personal basic electrocardiograph (ECG) devices and managers (e.g., cell phones, personal computers, personal health appliances, and set top boxes) in a manner that enables plug-and-play interoperability. It leverages appropriate portions of existing standards including ISO/IEEE 11073 terminology and IEEE Std 11073-20601 information models. It specifies the use of specific term codes, formats, and behaviors in telehealth environments restricting optionality in base frameworks in favor of interoperability. This standard defines a common core of communication functionality for personal telehealth basic ECG (1- to 3-lead ECG) devices. Monitoring ECG devices are distinguished from diagnostic ECG equipment with respect to including support for wearable ECG devices, limiting the number of leads supported by the equipment to three, and not requiring the capability of annotating or analyzing the detected electrical activity to determine known cardiac phenomena. This standard is consistent with the base framework and allows multifunction implementations by following multiple device specializations (e.g., ECG and respiration rate).