A dual-core system solution for wearable health monitors

This paper presents a system design study for wearable sensor devices intended for healthcare and lifestyle applications based on ECG, EEG and activity monitoring. In order to meet the low-power requirement of these applications, a dual-core signal processing system is proposed which combines an ultra-low-power bio-medical Application Specific Instruction-set Processor (BioASIP) and a low-power general-purpose micro-controller (MSP430). To validate the merits of the proposed architecture, system-level power analysis and trade-offs are conducted using real hardware measurements of an ECG R-peak detection application. The results show that the proposed dual-core architecture consumes around 65.38µW, about 25.8x smaller than an MSP430-only approach. Out of 65.38µW, the BioASIP consumes only 11µW and the rest is used in the analog front-end, A/D conversion, and control tasks