Intelligent Edge Biomedical Sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT) Era

AbstractThe design of reliable wearable systems for real-time and long-term monitoring presents major challenges, although they are poised as the next frontier of innovation in the context of Internet-of-Things (IoT) to provide personalized healthcare. This new generation of biomedical sensors targets to be interconnected in ways that improve our lives and transform the medical industry. Therefore, they offer an excellent opportunity to integrate the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) based techniques in medical devices. However, several key challenges remain in achieving this potential due to the inherent resource-constrained nature of wearable systems for Big Data medical applications, which need to detect pathologies in real time. Concretely, in this chapter, we discuss the opportunities for edge computing and edge AI in next-generation intelligent biomedical sensors in the IoT era and the key challenges in wearable systems design for pathology detection and health/activity monitoring in the context of IoT technologies. First, we introduce the notion of self-awareness toward the conception of the next-generation intelligent edge biomedical sensors to trade-off machine-learning performance versus system lifetime, according to the application requirements of the medical monitoring systems. Subsequently, we present the implications of personalization and multi-parametric sensing in the context of the system-level architecture of intelligent edge biomedical sensors. Thus, they can adapt to the real world, as living organisms do, to operate efficiently according to the target application requirements and available energy at any moment in time. Then, we discuss the impacts of self-awareness and low-power requirements at the circuit level for sampling through a paradigm shift to react to the input signal itself. Finally, we conclude by highlighting that the techniques discussed in this chapter may be applied jointly to design the next-generation intelligent biomedical sensors and systems in the IoT era.