Energy-efficient Blood Pressure Monitoring based on Single-site Photoplethysmogram on Wearable Devices.

The paper proposes accurate Blood Pressure Monitoring (BPM) based on a single-site Photoplethysmographic (PPG) sensor and provides an energy-efficient solution on edge cuffless wearable devices. Continuous PPG signal preprocessed and used as input of the Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and outputs systolic BP (SBP), diastolic BP (DBP), and mean arterial BP (MAP) values for each heartbeat. The improvement of the BPM accuracy is obtained by removing outliers in the preprocessing step and the whole-based inputs compared to parameter-based inputs extracted from the PPG signal. Performance obtained is 3.42 ± 5.42 mmHg (MAE ± RMSD) for SBP, 1.92 ± 3.29 mmHg for DBP, and 2.21 ± 3.50 mmHg for MAP which is competitive compared to other studies. This is the first BPM solution with edge computing artificial intelligence as we have learned so far. Evaluation experiments on real hardware show that the solution takes 42.2 ms, 18.2 KB RAM, and 2.1 mJ average energy per reading.

Single-Channel EEG Based Arousal Level Estimation Using Multitaper Spectrum Estimation at Low-Power Wearable Devices.

This paper proposes a novel lightweight method using the multitaper power spectrum to estimate arousal levels at wearable devices. We show that the spectral slope (1/f) of the electrophysiological power spectrum reflects the scale-free neural activity. To evaluate the proposed feature's performance, we used scalp EEG recorded during anesthesia and sleep with technician-scored Hypnogram annotations. It is shown that the proposed methodology discriminates wakefulness from reduced arousal solely based on the neurophysiological brain state with more than 80% accuracy. Therefore, our findings describe a common electrophysiological marker that tracks reduced arousal states, which can be applied to different applications (e.g., emotion detection, driver drowsiness). Evaluation on hardware shows that the proposed methodology can be implemented for devices with a minimum RAM of 512 KB with 55 mJ average energy consumption.