Atrial Fibrillation Detection on Low-Power Wearables using Knowledge Distillation

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2021 Nov:2021:6795-6799. doi: 10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9630957.

Abstract

The increasing complexity and memory requirements of neural networks have been slowing down the adoption of AI in low-power wearable devices, which impose important restrictions in computational power and memory footprint. These low-power systems are the key to obtain 24/7 monitoring systems necessary for the current personalized healthcare trend since they do not require constant charging. In this work, we apply Knowledge Distillation to our previously published convolutional-recurrent neural network for cardiac arrhythmia detection and classification. We show that the resulting network halves the memory footprint (138 K parameters) and the number of operations (1.84 MOp) compared to the baseline. By using Knowledge Distillation, this network also achieves significantly higher accuracy after quantization (increase in overall F1 score from 0.779 to 0.828) and is capable of running into a nRF52832 System-on-Chip from Nordic Semiconductors. This promising result lays the groundwork for deployment on resource-constrained embedded platforms such as micro-controllers of the ARM Cortex-M family, thus potentially enabling continuous detection of cardiac arrhythmias in low-power wearable devices.

MeSH terms

  • Atrial Fibrillation* / diagnosis
  • Distillation
  • Electrocardiography
  • Humans
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Wearable Electronic Devices*