An energy-efficient hardware system for robust and reliable heart rate monitoring

Li, Qingkun

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/78330 Copy

Description

Title

An energy-efficient hardware system for robust and reliable heart rate monitoring

Author(s)

Li, Qingkun

Issue Date

2015-03-16

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

• Iyer, Ravishankar K.
• Kalbarczyk, Zbigniew T.

Department of Study

Electrical & Computer Eng

Discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.S.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• reconfigurable hardware
• biomedical monitoring
• fault tolerance
• embedded hardware
• heart rate monitoring

Abstract

Cardiac arrhythmia, one of the most common causes of death in the world today, is not always effectively detected by regular examinations, as it usually occurs infrequently and suddenly. Therefore, real-time, continuous monitoring of the heart rate is needed to detect arrhythmia problems sooner and prevent their severe consequences. To make continuous monitoring possible and give it widespread acceptance, a portable heart rate monitoring system must have three key characteristics: (1) accuracy, (2) portability, and (3) long battery life. Previous studies have focused on addressing these problems separately, either improving the accuracy of the monitoring algorithm or the efficiency of the underlying hardware. This thesis proposes a robust and reliable heart rate monitoring system (RRHMS), in which both algorithm accuracy and hardware efficiency are considered. As a result, algorithmic optimizations are exploited to enable further hardware efficiency. In the RRHMS, robust heart rate monitoring is achieved by extracting heart rates from both electrocardiogram (ECG) and arterial blood pressure (ABP) signals and fusing them based on the signal qualities. Therefore, accurate heart rate data can be provided continuously, even when one signal is severely corrupted. Algorithmic optimizations are applied to merge the separate ECG and ABP processing steps into shared ones, which allows shared hardware modules and hence low-area (portable) hardware design. Also, an embedded hardware architecture framework is proposed for the design of the RRHMS hardware system. Coarse-grained functional units (FUs) can be easily added or removed in this framework, allowing for application-specific hardware optimization. Further, the application invariant properties are used to achieve low-overhead fault tolerance in the FUs to enhance reliability. Both ASIC and FPGA implementations of the RRHMS are able to accurately detect heart rates in real time while consuming only 1/2870 and 1/923 of the energy required by the Android implementation.

Graduation Semester

2015-5

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/78330

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2015 Qingkun Li

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