Real-Time Personalized Atrial Fibrillation Prediction on Multi-Core Wearable Sensors

In the recent Internet-of-Things (IoT) era where biomedical applications require continuous monitoring of relevant data, edge computing keeps gaining more and more importance. These new architectures for edge computing include multi-core and parallel computing capabilities that can enable prevention diagnosis and treatment of diseases in ambulatory or home-based setups. In this article, we explore the benefits of the parallelization capabilities and computing heterogeneity of new wearable sensors in the context of a personalized online atrial fibrillation (AF) prediction method for daily monitoring. First, we apply optimizations to a single-core design to reduce energy, based on patient-specific training models. Second, we explore multi-core and memory banks configuration changes to adapt the computation and storage requirements to the characteristics of each patient. We evaluate our methodology on the Physionet Prediction Challenge (2001) publicly available database, and assess the energy consumption of single-core (ARM Cortex-M3 based) and new ultra-low power multi-core architectures (open-source RISC-V based) for next-generation of wearable platforms. Overall, our exploration at the application level highlights that a parallelization approach for personalized AF in multi-core wearable sensors enables energy savings up to 24% with respect to single-core sensors. Moreover, including the adaptation of the memory subsystem (size and number of memory banks), in combination with deep sleep energy saving modes, can overall provide total energy savings up to 34%, depending on the specific patient.