Hand movement classification via surface electromyographic (sEMG) signal is a well-established approach for advanced Human-Computer Interaction. However, sEMG movement recognition has to deal with the long-term reliability of sEMG-based control, limited by the variability affecting the sEMG signal. Embedded solutions are affected by a recognition accuracy drop over time that makes them unsuitable for reliable gesture controller design. In this paper, we present a complete wearable-class embedded system for robust sEMGbased gesture recognition, based on Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs). Firstly, we developed a novel TCN topology (TEMPONet), and we tested our solution on a benchmark dataset (Ninapro), achieving 49.6% average accuracy, 7.8%, better than current State-Of-the-Art (SoA). Moreover, we designed an energy-efficient embedded platform based on GAP8, a novel 8-core IoT processor. Using our embedded platform, we collected a second 20-sessions dataset to validate the system on a setup which is representative of the final deployment. We obtain 93.7% average accuracy with the TCN, comparable with a SoA SVM approach (91.1%). Finally, we profiled the performance of the network implemented on GAP8 by using an 8-bit quantization strategy to fit the memory constraint of the processor. We reach a 4× lower memory footprint (460 kB) with a performance degradation of only 3% accuracy. We detailed the execution on the GAP8 platform, showing that the quantized network executes a single classification in 12.84 ms with a power envelope of 0.9 mJ, making it suitable for a longlifetime wearable deployment.

This work presents a wearable EMG gesture recognition system based on the hyperdimensional (HD) computing paradigm, running on a programmable Parallel Ultra-Low-Power (PULP) platform. The processing chain includes efficient on-chip training, which leads to a fully embedded implementation with no need to perform any offline training on a personal computer. The proposed solution has been tested on 10 subjects in a typical gesture recognition scenario achieving 85% average accuracy on 11 gestures recognition, which is aligned with the State-Of-the-Art (SoA), with the unique capability of performing online learning. Furthermore, by virtue of the Hardware (HW) friendly algorithm and of the efficient PULP System-on-Chip (SoC) (Mr. Wolf) used for prototyping and evaluation, the energy budget required to run the learning part with 11 gestures is 10.04mJ, and 83.2µJ per classification. The system works with a average power consumption of 10.4mW in classification, ensuring around 29h of autonomy with a 100mAh battery. Finally, the scalability of the system is explored by increasing the number of channels (up-to 256 electrodes), demonstrating the suitability of our approach as universal, energy-efficient biopotential wearable recognition framework.

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Drowsiness detection mechanisms have been extensively studied in the last years since they are one of the prevalent causes of accidents within the mining, driving and industrial activities. Many research efforts were done to quantify the drowsiness levels using behavioral analyses based on camera eye tracking systems as well as by analyzing physiological features contained in EEG signals. Detection systems typically use specific drowsiness indicators from only one of these methods, leaving a risk of missed detection since not all the population presents same symptoms of drowsiness [1]. Thus, multi-feature systems are preferable even though most of the current State-of-the-Art (SoA) solutions are based on power-hungry platforms and they have meager chance to be used in embedded wearable applications with long battery lifetime. This work presents a drowsiness detection scheme fusing behavioral information coming from user motion through an IMU sensor and physiological information coming from brain activity through a single EEG electrode. The solution is implemented and tested on a low power programmable platform based on an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller, resulting in a wearable device capable to detect 5 different levels of drowsiness with an average accuracy of 95.2% and a battery life of 6 hours, using a 200mAh battery. We also study the energy optimization achievable by accelerating the sensor fusion-based drowsiness detector on a parallel ultra-low power (PULP) platform. Results show that the use of PULP as efficient processing platform provides an energy improvement of 63x with respect to a solution based on a commercial microcontroller. This may extend the battery life of the complete system up to 46 hours with a 7x improvement, paving the way for a completely wearable, always-on system.