Technical standards are terribly important; without them, everything is proprietary. Everyday things like plugs and outlets? There’s standards for that. And Ethernet didn’t take over the world until the IEEE 802 standards got set. You can’t have an ecosystem without standards. That’s why it’s so important that the IEEE (the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers) has started work on updated standards for health-related wearables. The P11703 series of projects (as they call pre-standards work) will cover pulse oximetry, blood pressure monitoring, thermometers, weight, and body composition. (In more advanced work, the IEEE is also working on standards for 3D medical visualization.) There are existing standards for all those things already, it turns out, but they date from as long ago as 2008; the state of the art in communication and device design has advanced significantly since then.