Within the context of the ISO/IEEE 11073 personal health device standard family, this standard defines an optimized exchange protocol and modeling techniques to be used by implementers of personal health devices to create interoperability between device types and vendors. This standard establishes a common framework for an abstract model of personal health data available in transport-independent transfer syntax required to establish logical connections between systems and to provide presentation capabilities and services needed to perform communication tasks. The protocol is optimized to personal health usage requirements and leverages commonly used methods and tools wherever possible.