A dual-core system solution for wearable health monitors

  • Authors:
  • Frank Bouwens;Jos Huisken;Harmke De Groot;Martijn Bennebroek;Anteneh Abbo;Octavio Santana;Jef van Meerbergen;Antoine Fraboulet

  • Affiliations:
  • Holst Centre / Stichting imec-nl, Eindhoven, Netherlands;Holst Centre / Stichting imec-nl, Eindhoven, Netherlands;Holst Centre / Stichting imec-nl, Eindhoven, Netherlands;Philips Research Europe, Eindhoven, Netherlands;Philips Research Europe, Eindhoven, Netherlands;Philips Research Europe, Eindhoven, Netherlands;Philips Research Europe, Eindhoven, Netherlands;INRIA, Lyon, France

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st edition of the great lakes symposium on Great lakes symposium on VLSI
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

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.