Keywords
Biomedical, Benchmarks, Ultra-Low Power, MCU, WearablesTeam
The design of low-power wearables for the biomedical domain has received much attention in recent decades, as technological advancements in chip manufacturing have allowed real-time monitoring of patients within the μW range. To ensure continued progression in this domain, a co-design view that optimizes both hardware and software simultaneously is necessary. In this work, we propose BiomedBench, a new benchmark suite composed of complete biomedical applications for real-time monitoring of patients using wearable devices. Each application presents different requirements during the typical signal acquisition and processing phases, including varying computational workloads and relations between active and idle times. Therefore, BiomedBench provides hardware developers with a tool to assess the efficiency of their ultra-low power (ULP) platform designs under varying requirements. Furthermore, we evaluated five state-of-the-art ULP platforms in terms of energy efficiency and performance using BiomedBench. This evaluation shows that current ULP platforms cannot effectively target all types of different biomedical applications. As a result, BiomedBench also allows system designers to identify the most suitable platform for their software applications. To this end, BiomedBench will be released as an open-source suite to enable future improvements in the entire domain of bioengineering systems and application design. |
