A dual-core system solution for wearable health monitors

Bouwens Frank (1) , Huisken Jos (1) , Harmke de Groot (1) , Martijn Bennebroek (2) , Anteneh Abbo (2) , Octavio Santana (2) , Jef van Meerbergen (2) , Antoine Fraboulet (3)

1 IMEC NL - Holst Centre
2 Philips Research [Nederlands]
3 AMAZONES - Ambient Middleware Architectures: Service-Oriented, Networked, Efficient and Secured

This paper presents a system design study for wearable sensor devices intended for healthcare and lifestyle applications based on ECG, EEG and activity monitoring. In order to meet the low-power requirement of these applications, a dual-core signal processing system is proposed which combines an ultra-low-power bio-medical Application Specific Instruction-set Processor (BioASIP) and a low-power general-purpose micro-controller (MSP430). To validate the merits of the proposed architecture, system-level power analysis and trade-offs are conducted using real hardware measurements of an ECG R-peak detection application. The results show that the proposed dual-core architecture consumes around 65.38µW, about 25.8x smaller than an MSP430-only approach. Out of 65.38µW, the BioASIP consumes only 11µW and the rest is used in the analog front-end, A/D conversion, and control tasks.

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation

Bouwens Frank, Huisken Jos, Harmke de Groot, Martijn Bennebroek, Anteneh Abbo, et al.. A dual-core system solution for wearable health monitors. GLSVLSI '11 Proceedings of the 21st edition of the great lakes symposium on Great lakes symposium on VLSI, May 2011, Lausanne, Switzerland. pp.379--382, ⟨10.1145/1973009.1973087⟩. ⟨hal-00597951⟩