BrainWave: an energy-efficient EEG monitoring system - evaluation and trade-offs

This paper presents the design and evaluation of an energy-efficient seizure detection system for emerging EEG-based monitoring applications, such as non-convulsive epileptic seizure detection and Freezing-of-Gait (FoG) detection. As part of the BrainWave system, a BrainWave processor for flexible and energy-efficient signal processing is designed. The key system design parameters, including algorithmic optimizations, feature offloading and near-threshold computing are evaluated in this work. The BrainWave processor is evaluated while executing a complex EEG-based epileptic seizure detection algorithm. In a 28-nm FDSOI technology, 325 μJ per classification at 0.9 V and 290 μJ at 0.5 V are achieved using an optimized software-only implementation. By leveraging a Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA), 160 μJ and 135 μJ are obtained, respectively, while maintaining a high level of flexibility. Near-threshold computing combined with CGRA acceleration leads to an energy reduction of up to 59%, or 55% including idle-time overhead.