Energy-Efficient FPGA Accelerator With Fidelity-Controllable Sliding-Region Signal Processing Unit for Abnormal ECG Diagnosis on IoT Edge Devices

Recently, with an increase in the number of healthcare devices, studies measuring and diagnosing electrocardiogram (ECG) signals in daily life are emerging. ECG signal analysis is an essential study area that can diagnose fatal heart abnormalities in humans at an early stage. Conventional signal detection uses one reference beat to diagnose ECG signals; thus, the detection rate is different for each person. In this study, we design a system that can learn a reference beat and diagnose ECG signals in real-time using hardware accelerators with the approximated template-based ECG diagnosis algorithm proposed in the previous study. The proposed algorithm can easily perform personalized learning, increasing the detection rate since it has faster learning time and consumes less memory than the existing algorithm. The learning data, which occupies a small memory space, enables real-time and simultaneous diagnosis of several people. We confirmed that the proposed ECG diagnosis algorithm is suitable for hardware acceleration by accelerating the ECG signal diagnosis and measuring the parallelized result using Alveo field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The ECG diagnosis algorithm, implemented at the FPGA in real-time, can flexibly determine reference beats that vary depending on the person and diagnose each person's signal. The experimental results showed that the time required to diagnose the ECG signals of five people containing 1987 beats takes 5.70 s with software and 0.572 s with hardware accelerators, which is 89.96% shorter than software execution time.