IEC 61340-3-1 is the part of the electrostatics series that defines the test waveforms used to simulate the electrostatic discharge produced by a human body. It belongs to the component level family of ESD standards rather than to the equipment level family, and it exists because the human body model has, over the years, been implemented in several different ways by different test equipment manufacturers. The standard specifies the equivalent circuit of the human body, which consists of a capacitor representing the charge stored in the body and a series resistor representing the impedance of the skin and of the discharge path, and it defines the resulting current waveform for each of the standard voltage steps. It gives the rise time, the peak current and the decay of the waveform, together with the tolerances that the test equipment must respect, and it describes the reference circuit and the measuring arrangement used to verify the waveform, including the requirements for the current probe and the oscilloscope. Alignment of the waveform between different generators is the practical purpose of the document.