EdgeECG: a lightweight edge-oriented network with dual criterion pruning for real-time ECG arrhythmia classification

Objective.Miniature electrocardiogram (ECG) devices can rapidly and accurately acquire real-time cardiac signals, enabling timely warnings for patients with heart disease. To achieve accurate arrhythmia classification on resource-constrained ECG edge devices, we propose EdgeECG, an ultra-lightweight neural network designed for deployment on low-power microcontrollers.Approach.EdgeECG is first designed with a compact convolutional architecture to ensure compatibility with resource-limited embedded platforms. A dual criterion pruning (DCP) strategy is then introduced to evaluate weight importance using both magnitude and median deviation for more precise model compression. In addition, quantization is applied to reduce storage cost and improve deployment efficiency on an STM32F103 microcontroller.Main results.Experimental results on the benchmark MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset show that EdgeECG achieves an overall classification accuracy of 98.07%, outperforming several representative methods. In patient-independent record-level evaluation, the accuracy reaches 80.73%. The model contains only 2680 parameters and is successfully deployed on an STM32F103 microcontroller with 64 KB SRAM, achieving an inference latency of 0.025 s and an energy consumption of 0.156 mJ per inference. In addition, DCP reduces the number of non-zero parameters by nearly 50% while maintaining promising classification performance.Significance.EdgeECG provides an effective solution for five-class ECG arrhythmia classification on severely resource-constrained edge devices. Its compact architecture, effective pruning strategy, and successful deployment on an STM32F103 demonstrate its potential for low-power edge-based ECG analysis and wearable cardiac monitoring applications. The source code of EdgeECG is publicly available at:https://github.com/jyanhuang/EdgeECG-code.