Acceleration of a CNN-based Heart Sound Segmenter: Implementation on Different Platforms Targeting a Wearable Device

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are currently one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Being able to detect their symptoms at early stages, even the most hidden ones, is crucial to shorten the diagnosis time and facilitate an early treatment. Currently, the use of continuous tracking systems, mainly based on wearable devices that analyze data using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, is being explored to automatically identify, in real time, CVDs symptoms. This could be especially relevant in lowincome countries where there is a shortage of specialized doctors. Therefore, this work focuses on analyzing the real-time execution of the state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) for heart sound segmentation (HSS) on platforms such as traditional CPU/GPU and the Fraunhofer IMS © AIRISC Core Complex (a RISC-V processor developed for AI). Results revealed that, while all implementations exploiting the CPU/GPU platform proved to be useful in real-time diagnosis from a fixed location, the AIRISC demonstrated its goodness, as a system on a chip (SoC) for a real-time wearable application, when executing a quantized version of the CNN.