Power Saving Techniques for Wearable Devices in Medical Applications

Many people in the world are living with chronic diseases, demanding continuous monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment. Continuous physiological monitoring is key to providing preventive healthcare and accurate disease diagnosis, which leads to a growing demand for autonomous wearable technology. Wearable devices acquiring physiological information from the patient demand high-power efficiency to operate in a continuous acquisition mode. While power-saving techniques are applied in wearable devices for many application, very few are considered for biomedical applications. In this work, we explore existing techniques of power reduction for wearable medical devices. Our analysis addresses the power reduction of wearable medical devices and their generalization for different medical signal processing applications. In addition, we propose a taxonomy for power-saving techniques. The common categories of power-saving techniques are task scheduling, clock management, signal compression, and energy awareness. The presented analysis identifies the most appropriate and combined low-power techniques in wearable devices to reduce power consumption.