Flexible Wearable Heart Rate Monitoring System and Low-Power Design: A Review

In an increasingly interconnected world, flexible wearable systems have emerged as transformative technologies, revolutionizing the monitoring and management of personal health and daily activities. With the surging demand for health monitoring, these systems have demonstrated remarkable potential in heart rate monitoring and the detection of heart rate irregularities. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the design of flexible wearable heart rate monitoring systems, with a particular focus on their low-power design. The low-power design is reviewed from four constituent modules of the system, namely the heart rate signal acquisition module, preprocessing module, computation module, and transmission/output module. Meanwhile, for each module, low-power design strategies are reviewed from three different dimensions: hardware-level optimization, algorithm-level enhancement, and hardware-algorithm co-design approaches. Through this multi-dimensional review, the importance of low-power design in flexible wearable heart rate monitoring systems is emphasized. In addition, this paper offers a perspective on the future of low-power design for flexible wearable heart rate monitoring systems. With the advancements in materials science and flexible electronics technology, it is believed that there will surely be better design methods and strategies for the low-power design of flexible wearable systems.