A fault-tolerant hardware architecture for robust wearable heart rate monitoring

Abstract

This paper presents a fault-tolerant hardware architecture for robust wearable heart rate monitoring. The proposed architecture is designed for fusion of the heart rates estimated from both electrocardiogram (ECG) and arterial blood pressure (ABP) signals, with small hardware footprint and low energy consumption. It benefits from the following unique features: (1) an optimized heart beat (peak) detection algorithm that can be dynamically configured for either ECG or ABP analysis, resulting in about 38% reduction of the hardware footprint, (2) coarse-grained reconfigurable functional units (FUs) that can be programmed for different processing flows, and (3) a low overhead fault detection and recovery unit that enables dynamic recovery from transient hardware faults in the FUs. Both FPGA and ASIC prototypes of the proposed hardware have achieved much better performance and energy efficiency compared to an Android implementation of the same algorithm, and can recover from transient faults with low resource (∼15%) and energy (∼34%) overheads and no (0%) performance impact.