Convolutional-Recurrent Neural Networks on Low-Power Wearable Platforms for Cardiac Arrhythmia Detection

Low-power sensing technologies, such as wearables, have emerged in the healthcare domain since they enable continuous and non-invasive monitoring of physiological signals. In order to endow such devices with clinical value, classical signal processing has encountered numerous challenges. However, data-driven methods, such as machine learning, offer attractive accuracies at the expense of being resource and memory demanding. In this paper, we focus on the inference of neural networks running in microcontrollers and low-power processors which wearable sensors and devices are generally equipped with. In particular, we adapted an existing convolutional-recurrent neural network, designed to detect and classify cardiac arrhythmias from a single-lead electrocardiogram, to the low-power embedded System-on-Chip nRF52 from Nordic Semiconductor with an ARM's Cortex-M4 processing core. We show our implementation in fixed-point precision, using the CMSIS-NN libraries, yields a drop of F1 score from 0.8 to 0.784, from the original implementation, with a memory footprint of 195.6KB, and a throughput of 33.98MOps/s.