Opportunities and challenges for ultra low power signal processing in wearable healthcare

Wearable devices are starting to revolutionise healthcare by allowing the unobtrusive and long term monitoring of a range of body parameters. Embedding more advanced signal processing algorithms into the wearable itself can: reduce system power consumption; increase device functionality; and enable closed-loop recording–stimulation with minimal latency; amongst other benefits. The design challenge is in realising algorithms within the very limited power budgets available. Wearable algorithms are now emerging to answer this challenge. Using a new review, and examples from a case study on EEG analysis, this article overviews the state-of-the-art in wearable algorithms. It demonstrates the opportunities and challenges, highlighting the open challenge of performance assessment and measuring variability.