ECG-LDC: A Hardware-Efficient Low-Dimensional Computing Framework for ECG Arrhythmia Classification

Continuous cardiac monitoring in wearable devices demands classifiers that are simultaneously accurate, energy-efficient, and deployable on resource-constrained hardware. While deep neural network approaches have demonstrated high classification accuracy for electrocardiogram (ECG) arrhythmia detection, their substantial parameter counts and reliance on multiply-accumulate-intensive operations make them impractical for low-cost edge platforms. In this work, we propose ECG-LDC, a hardware-software co-design framework that adapts Low-Dimensional Computing (LDC) for real-time ECG arrhythmia classification. ECG-LDC employs a dual-encoder architecture with dedicated value and feature codebooks to independently encode morphological waveform features and RR-interval temporal features, enabling effective capture of both intra-beat and inter-beat cardiac dynamics. The framework encompasses data preprocessing, model training, and a hardware accelerator architecture prototyped on the Pynq-Z2 platform. Implemented using binary representations and XOR/XNOR-based operations, ECG-LDC achieves 97.18% accuracy with a memory footprint of only 3.86 kB. ECG-LDC sacrifices approximately 1.8% accuracy versus SOTA TinyML classifiers but achieves 11~ 570× reduction in memory usage; among FPGA-based five-class arrhythmia classifiers, it delivers the highest accuracy with up to 2.4× fewer LUTs and zero DSP block utilization, affirming its suitability for real-time arrhythmia detection on resource-constrained wearable platforms.