At the Edge of the Heart: ULP FPGA-Based CNN for On-Device Cardiac Feature Extraction in Smart Health Sensors for Astronauts

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25799v1
• Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:10:16 GMT
• Title: At the Edge of the Heart: ULP FPGA-Based CNN for On-Device Cardiac Feature Extraction in Smart Health Sensors for Astronauts
• Abstract summary: We present an ultra-low-power (ULP) Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based solution for real-time Seismocardiography (SCG) feature classification.<n>Our approach combines quantization-aware training with a systolic-array accelerator to enable efficient integer-only inference on the Lattice iCE40UP5K FPGA.<n>The implementation achieves a validation accuracy of 98% while consuming only 8.55 mW, completing inference in 95.5 ms with minimal hardware resources.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The convergence of accelerating human spaceflight ambitions and critical terrestrial health monitoring demands is driving unprecedented requirements for reliable, real-time feature extraction on extremely resource-constrained wearable health sensors. We present an ultra-low-power (ULP) Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based solution for real-time Seismocardiography (SCG) feature classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Our approach combines quantization-aware training with a systolic-array accelerator to enable efficient integer-only inference on the Lattice iCE40UP5K FPGA, which offers an ideal platform for battery-powered deployments -- particularly in space environments -- thanks to its power efficiency and radiation resilience. The implementation achieves a validation accuracy of 98% while consuming only 8.55 mW, completing inference in 95.5 ms with minimal hardware resources (2,861 LUTs and 7 DSP blocks). These results demonstrate that fully on-device SCG-based cardiac feature extraction is feasible on resource-constrained hardware, enabling energy-efficient, autonomous health monitoring for astronauts in long-duration space missions.

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