Migrating Intelligence from Cloud to Ultra-Edge Smart IoT Sensor Based on Deep Learning: An Arrhythmia Monitoring Use-Case

Abstract

Traditionally, the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, deployed on the ultra-edge of the network, lack computation, and energy resources. In this paper, we press on the need to go beyond the realms of traditional edge computing (e.g., limited to user-smartphones) and investigate how to incorporate intelligence into the ultra-edge IoT sensors. Among numerous use-cases, we select a mobile Health (mHealth) scenario where we conceptualize a smart IoT sensor to collect and intelligently process single-channel Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals to detect arrhythmia, a heart-condition often associated with morbidity and even mortality. The arrhythmia detection can be regarded as a non-linear Delay Differential Equation (DDE) time-series analysis problem, and the conventional solutions to this problem are not suitable for integration with IoT sensors due to rigorous pre-processing steps. As a solution, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based, lightweight Arrhythmia classification system is proposed in the paper without the need for noise-filtering and feature extraction steps. Four classes of the heartbeats are considered to comply with the ANSI/AAMI EC57:1998 standard. The proposed system's performances and generalization potential are assessed using three datasets from PhysioNet trained on a deep learning workstation and then transferred to virtualized micro-controllers connected to IoT sensors. The proposed deep learning model exhibits encouraging performance (accuracy 95.27%) in heartbeat classification. Experimental and numerical results demonstrate that the proposed deep learning technique outperforms conventional DDE-based optimization techniques and machine learning techniques such as K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and random forest (RF).