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, 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; 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 multi-function implementations by following multiple device specializations (e.g., ECG and respiration rate).