ApproxCS: Near-Sensor Approximate Compressed Sensing for IoT-Healthcare Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces ApproxCS, a low-power approximate compressed sensing framework for IoT healthcare systems that significantly reduces energy consumption while maintaining critical event detection accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes integrating approximate computing with compressed sensing using low-power approximate adders in IoT healthcare, enabling energy savings without compromising critical biomedical signal detection.

Findings

Achieved approximately 59% energy savings compared to accurate designs.

Validated the approach using the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database.

Demonstrated safe employment of approximations in biomedical signal processing.

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoTs) is an emerging trend that has enabled an upgrade in the design of wearable healthcare monitoring systems through the (integrated) edge, fog, and cloud computing paradigm. Energy efficiency is one of the most important design metrics in such IoT-healthcare systems especially, for the edge and fog nodes. Due to the sensing noise and inherent redundancy in the input data, even the most safety-critical biomedical applications can sometimes afford a slight degradation in the output quality. Hence, such inherent error tolerance in the bio-signals can be exploited to achieve high energy savings through the emerging trends like, the Approximate Computing which is applicable at both software and hardware levels. In this paper, we propose to leverage the approximate computing in digital Compressed Sensing (CS), through low-power approximate adders (LPAA) in an accurate Bernoulli sensing-based CS acquisition (BCS). We demonstrate that approximations can indeed be safely employed in IoT healthcare without affecting the detection of critical events in the biomedical signals. Towards this, we explored the trade-of between energy efficiency and output quality using the state-of-the-art lp2d RLS reconstruction algorithm. The proposed framework is validated with the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. Our results demonstrated approximately 59% energy savings as compared to the accurate design.