Defining extensible markup language standards for electromyography data transmission across the world-wide web

Different electromyography (EMG) machines store their data in different formats that vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and even between different EMG machines from the same manufacturer. As advanced as these machines are today, it is necessary in most cases to use faxes, scanners, or a common interface such as Adobe's file format to exchange data between them. A possible solution to this problem is to translate the EMG machine's data output into a common format that can be read (and displayed) by commonly available programs or, even better, by a Web browser. We describe an EMG-extensible markup language (XML) translation program that takes proprietary data from an EMG machine and translates the data into XML, a common language format. Predefined extensible stylesheet language (XSL) style sheets allow the display of the data in user-defined formats for EMG machines, personal digital assistants such as Palm Pilots, and even cellular phones.