Edge2Analysis: A Novel AIoT Platform for Atrial Fibrillation Recognition and Detection

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a serious medical condition of the heart potentially leading to stroke, which can be diagnosed by analyzing electrocardiograms (ECG). Technologies of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) enable smart abnormality detection by analyzing streaming healthcare data from the sensor end of users. Analyzing streaming data in the cloud leads to challenges of response latency and privacy issues, and local inference by a model deployed on the user end brings difficulties in model update and customization. Therefore, we propose an AIoT Platform with AF recognition neural networks on the sensor edge with model retraining ability on a resource-constrained embedded system. To this aim, we proposed to combine simple but effective neural networks and an ECG feature selection strategy to reduce computing complexity while maintaining recognition performance. Based on the platform, we evaluated and discussed the performance, response time, and requirements for model retraining in the scenario of AF detection from ECG recordings. The proposed lightweight solution was validated with two public datasets and an ECG data stream simulation on an ATmega2560 processor, proving the feasibility of analysis and training on edge.