TinyCardioUNet: IMU-to-ECG Translation with Graph-Encoded Inter-Axis Dependencies and Tensor Decomposition-Based Parameter Reduction

Estimating electrocardiography (ECG) from a chest-worn inertial measurement unit (IMU) enables continuous heart rate (HR) monitoring without the discomfort of electrodes. We propose TinyCardioUNet, a lightweight UNet that uses all six IMU axes without prior channel selection, refines its bottleneck with a graph neural network that encodes inter-axis dependencies, and employs tensor decomposition with automatic variational Bayesian rank selection for parameter reduction. On a public dataset, TinyCardioUNet achieves an RMSE of 0.098 and a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.677 with only 36.0k parameters and remains comparatively robust to additive noise, demonstrating accurate ECG reconstruction with a compact model.