Wearable Devices and Low-Power Design for Smart Health Applications: Challenges and Opportunities

Wearable devices can enable affordable and accessible smart health care services with the help of innovative low-power design and edge computing technologies. Indeed, novel wearable devices are already fueling a shift from a hospital-centric setting to more personalized home-based solutions [1]. A wide variety of miniature, flexible, and stretchable sensors enable collecting real-time data without impeding users’ daily routines. For example, inertial measurement units (IMUs) based on MEMS technology integrate a 9-axis accelerometer/gyroscope/magnetometer into a small package. Similarly, bend and stretch sensors embedded into clothes measure knee and hip angles, while biosensors track biopotentials, such as electrocardiogram (ECG) and electromyography (EMG). Then, novel edge-AI algorithms process the real-time data using low-power processors to build smart health applications ranging from health and activity monitoring to early diagnosis and prognosis [2] (Section B). One of the most critical challenges in wearable smart health applications is the stringent energy capacity imposed by size and weight constraints [2], [3]. All the required sensing, processing, and communications tasks must be performed without any manual charging or battery maintenance effort to maximize the user experience (Section C). The rest of this extended abstract discusses the challenges and potential solutions for driver applications and energy management techniques.