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The electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most extensively employed signals used to diagnose and predict cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). In recent years, several deep learning (DL) models have been proposed to improve detection accuracy. Among these, deep neural networks (DNNs) are the most popular, wherein the features are extracted automatically. Despite the increment in classification accuracy, DL models require exorbitant computational resources and power. This causes the mapping of DNNs to be slow; in addition, the mapping is challenging for a wearable device. Embedded systems have constrained power and memory resources. Therefore full-precision DNNs are not easily deployable on devices. To make the neural network faster and more power-efficient, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have been introduced for fewer operations and less complex hardware resources. However, the conventional SNN has low accuracy and high computational cost. Therefore, this paper proposes a new binarized SNN which modifies the synaptic weights of SNN constraining it to be binary (+1 and -1). In the simulation results, this paper compares the DL models and SNNs and evaluates which model is optimal for ECG classification. Although there is a slight compromise in accuracy, the latter proves to be energy-efficient.

Image processing is one of the major techniques that are used for computer vision. Nowadays, researchers are using machine learning and deep learning for the aforementioned task. In recent years, digit recognition tasks, i.e., automatic meter recognition approach using electric or water meters, have been studied several times. However, two major issues arise when we talk about previous studies: first, the use of the deep learning technique, which includes a large number of parameters that increase the computational cost and consume more power; and second, recent studies are limited to the detection of digits and not storing or providing detected digits to a database or mobile applications. This paper proposes a system that can detect the digital number of meter readings using a lightweight deep neural network (DNN) for low power consumption and send those digits to an Android mobile application in real-time to store them and make life easy. The proposed lightweight DNN is computationally inexpensive and exhibits accuracy similar to those of conventional DNNs.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) classification has become an essential task of modern day wearable devices, and can be used to detect cardiovascular diseases. State-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based ECG classifiers have been designed using various artificial neural networks (ANNs). Despite their high accuracy, ANNs require significant computational resources and power. Herein, three different ANNs have been compared: multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), and spiking neural network (SNN) only for the ECG classification. The ANN model has been developed in Python and Theano, trained on a central processing unit (CPU) platform, and deployed on a PYNQ-Z2 FPGA board to validate the model using a Jupyter notebook. Meanwhile, the hardware accelerator is designed with Overlay, which is a hardware library on PYNQ. For classification, the MIT-BIH dataset obtained from the Physionet library is used. The resulting ANN system can accurately classify four ECG types: normal, atrial premature contraction, left bundle branch block, and premature ventricular contraction. The performance of the ECG classifier models is evaluated based on accuracy and power. Among the three AI algorithms, the SNN requires the lowest power consumption of 0.226 W on-chip, followed by MLP (1.677 W), and CNN (2.266 W). However, the highest accuracy is achieved by the CNN (95%), followed by MLP (76%) and SNN (90%).