An Optimized Heart Rate Detection System Based on Low-Power Microcontroller Platforms for Biosignal Processing

The real-time detection of the R peaks of the ECG signal is crucial to provide information on cardiac functionality, and several strategies have been presented in the past. In this work, we adapt the classical Pan and Tompkins (PT) algorithm for efficient execution on low-power microcontroller (MCU) platforms to design a full-fledged heart rate detection system. We target a commercial MCU based on ARM Cortex-M4 and an ultra-low-power solution based on the RISC-V PULP platform. Experimental results show that our approach achieves an accuracy above 99.5%, comparable to the state-of-the-art solutions, and an energy efficiency that is one order of magnitude better than other software solutions.