Energy-Efficient Real-Time Heart Monitoring on Edge-Fog-Cloud Internet of Medical Things

The recent developments in wearable devices and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) allow real-time monitoring and recording of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. However, continuous monitoring of ECG signals is challenging in low-power wearable devices due to energy and memory constraints. Therefore, in this article, we present a novel and energy-efficient methodology for continuously monitoring the heart for low-power wearable devices. The proposed methodology is composed of three different layers: 1) a noise/artifact detection layer to grade the quality of the ECG signals; 2) a normal/abnormal beat classification layer to detect the anomalies in the ECG signals; and 3) an abnormal beat classification layer to detect diseases from ECG signals. Moreover, a distributed multioutput convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is used to decrease the energy consumption and latency between the edge-fog/cloud. Our methodology reaches an accuracy of 99.2% on the well-known MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Data Set. Evaluation on real hardware shows that our methodology is suitable for devices having a minimum RAM of 32 kb. Moreover, the proposed methodology achieves 7x more energy efficiency compared to state-of-the-art works.