BioWolf: A Sub-10-mW 8-Channel Advanced Brain-Computer Interface Platform With a Nine-Core Processor and BLE Connectivity

IEEE Trans Biomed Circuits Syst. 2019 Oct;13(5):893-906. doi: 10.1109/TBCAS.2019.2927551. Epub 2019 Jul 9.

Abstract

Advancements in digital signal processing (DSP) and machine learning techniques have boosted the popularity of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), where electroencephalography is a widely accepted method to enable intuitive human-machine interaction. Nevertheless, the evolution of such interfaces is currently hampered by the unavailability of embedded platforms capable of delivering the required computational power at high energy efficiency and allowing for a small and unobtrusive form factor. To fill this gap, we developed BioWolf, a highly wearable (40 mm × 20 mm × 2 mm) BCI platform based on Mr. Wolf, a parallel ultra low power system-on-chip featuring nine RISC-V cores with DSP-oriented instruction set extensions. BioWolf also integrates a commercial 8-channel medical-grade analog-to-digital converter, and an ARM-Cortex M4 microcontroller unit (MCU) with bluetooth low-energy connectivity. To demonstrate the capabilities of the system, we implemented and tested a BCI featuring canonical correlation analysis (CCA) of steady-state visual evoked potentials. The system achieves an average information transfer rate of 1.46 b/s (aligned with the state-of-the-art of bench-top systems). Thanks to the reduced power envelope of the digital computational platform, which consumes less than the analog front-end, the total power budget is just 6.31 mW, providing up to 38 h operation (65 mAh battery). To our knowledge, our design is the first to explore the significant energy boost of a parallel MCU with respect to single-core MCUs for CCA-based BCI.

Publication types

  • Clinical Trial
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Brain-Computer Interfaces*
  • Electroencephalography*
  • Evoked Potentials, Visual / physiology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning*
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Wearable Electronic Devices*