AI-On-Skin: Towards Enabling Fast and Scalable On-body AI Inference for Wearable On-Skin Interfaces

Abstract

Existing artificial skin interfaces lack on-skin AI compute that can provide fast neural network inference for time-critical applications. In this paper, we propose AI-on-skin-a wearable artificial skin interface integrated with a neural network hardware accelerator that can be reconfigured to run diverse neural network models and applications. AI-on-skin is designed to scale to the entire body, comprising tiny, low-power, accelerators distributed across the body. We built 7 AI-on-Skin application prototypes and our user trials show AI-On-Skin achieving 20X and 50X speedup over off-body inference via Bluetooth and on-body centralized microprocessor based inference approach respectively. We also project the power performance of AI-on-skin with our accelerator fabricated as silicon chips instead of emulated on FPGAs and show 10X further power savings. To the best of our knowledge, AI-on-Skin is the first ever wearable prototype to demonstrate skin interfaces with on-body AI inference.