Resource-Constrained On-Chip AI Classifier for Beat-by-Beat Real-Time Arrhythmia Detection with an ECG Wearable System

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the vital physiological signals for human health. Lightweight neural network (NN) models integrated into a low-resource wearable device can benefit the user with a low-power, real-time edge computing system for continuous and daily monitoring. This work introduces a novel edge-computing wearable device for real-time beat-by-beat ECG arrhythmia classification. The proposed wearable integrates the light AI model into a 32-bit ARM® Cortex™-based custom printed circuit board (PCB). The work analyzes the performance of artificial neural network (ANN), convolutional neural network (CNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) models for real-time wearable implementation. The wearable is capable of real-time QRS detection and feature extraction from raw ECG data. The QRS detection algorithm offers high reliability with a 99.5% F1 score and R-peak position error (RPE) of 6.3 ms for R-peak-to-R-peak intervals. The proposed method implements a combination of top time series, spectral, and signal-specific features for model development. Lightweight, pretrained models are deployed on the custom wearable and evaluated in real time using mock data from the MIT-BIH dataset. We propose an LSTM model that provides efficient performance over accuracy, inference latency, and memory consumption. The proposed model offers 98.1% accuracy, with 98.2% sensitivity and 99.5% specificity while testing in real time on the wearable. Real-time inferencing takes 20 ms, and the device consumes as low as 5.9 mA of power. The proposed method achieves efficient performance in real-time testing, which indicates the wearable can be effectively used for real-time continuous arrhythmia detection.