A lightweight convolutional neural network hardware implementation for wearable heart rate anomaly detection

In this article, we propose a lightweight and competitively accurate heart rhythm abnormality classification model based on classical convolutional neural networks in deep neural networks and hardware acceleration techniques to address the shortcomings of existing wearable devices for ECG detection. The proposed approach to build a high-performance ECG rhythm abnormality monitoring coprocessor achieves a high degree of data reuse in time and space, which reduces the number of data flows, provides a more efficient hardware implementation and reduces hardware resource consumption than most existing models. The designed hardware circuit relies on 16-bit floating-point numbers for data inference at the convolutional, pooling, and fully connected layers, and implements acceleration of the computational subsystem through a 21-group floating-point multiplicative-additive computational array and an adder tree. The front- and back-end design of the chip was completed on the TSMC 65 nm process. The device has an area of 0.191 mm2, a core voltage of 1 V, an operating frequency of 20 MHz, a power consumption of 1.1419 mW, and requires 5.12 kByte of storage space. The architecture was evaluated using the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database dataset, which showed a classification accuracy of 97.69% and a classification time of 0.3 ms for a single heartbeat. The hardware architecture offers high accuracy with a simple structure, low resource footprint, and the ability to operate on edge devices with relatively low hardware configurations.