Work

At the Edge of the Heart: ULP FPGA-Based CNN for On-Device Cardiac Feature Extraction in Smart Health Sensors for Astronauts

Year: 2026

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: The convergence of accelerating human spaceflight ambitions and critical terrestrial health monitoring demands is driving unprecedented requirements for reliable, real-time feature extraction on extremely resource-constrained wearable health sensors. We present an ultra-low-power (ULP) Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based solution for real-time Seismocardiography (SCG) feature classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Our approach combines quantization-aware training with a systolic-array accelerator to enable efficient integer-only inference on the Lattice iCE40UP5K FPGA, which offers an ideal platform for battery-powered deployments -- particularly in space environments -- thanks to its power efficiency and radiation resilience. The implementation achieves a validation accuracy of 98% while consuming only 8.55 mW, completing inference in 95.5 ms with minimal hardware resources (2,861 LUTs and 7 DSP blocks). These results demonstrate that fully on-device SCG-based cardiac feature extraction is feasible on resource-constrained hardware, enabling energy-efficient, autonomous health monitoring for astronauts in long-duration space missions.

Source: International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT)

DOI: 10.1109/dcoss-iot69657.2026.00019

Authors: Kazi Mohammad Abidur Rahman, Davis Rakhshan, Philipp Lütke, Laura Harms, Ulf Kulau

Institutions: Hamburg University of Technology, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

Language: English

Topic: Embedded Systems Design Techniques

Subfield: Hardware and Architecture

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funders: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt