BioGAP-Ultra: A Modular Edge-AI Platform for Wearable Multimodal Biosignal Acquisition and Processing

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Abstract
The growing demand for continuous physiological monitoring and human-machine interaction in real-world settings calls for wearable platforms that are flexible, low-power, and capable of on-device intelligence. This work presents BioGAP-Ultra, an advanced multimodal biosensing platform that supports synchronized acquisition of diverse electrophysiological and hemodynamic signals such as EEG, EMG, ECG, and PPG while enabling embedded AI processing at state-of-the-art energy efficiency. BioGAP-Ultra is a major extension of our previous BioGAP design aimed at meeting the rapidly growing requirements of wearable biosensing applications. It features (i) increased on-device storage ($\times$2 SRAM, $\times$4 FLASH), (ii) improved wireless connectivity (supporting up to 1.4 Mbit/s bandwidth, $\times$4 higher than BioGAP), (iii) enhanced number of signal modalities (from 3 to 5) and analog input channels ($\times$2). Further, it is accompanied by a real-time visualization and analysis software suite that supports the hardware design, providing access to raw data and real-time configurability on a mobile phone. Finally, we demonstrate the system’s versatility through integration into various wearable form factors: an EEG-PPG headband consuming 32.8 mW, an EMG sleeve at 26.7 mW, and an ECG-PPG chestband requiring only 9.3 mW for continuous acquisition and streaming, tailored for diverse biosignal applications. To showcase its edge-AI capabilities, we further deploy two representative on-device applications: (1) ECG-PPG-based PAT estimation at 8.6 mW, and (2) EMG-ACC-based classification of reach-and-grasp motion phases, achieving 79.9 % $\pm$ 5.7 % accuracy at 23.6 mW. All hardware and software design files are also released open-source with a permissive license.
Funding Information
  • Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (193813)
  • ETH-Domain Joint Initiative program
  • ETH Future Computing Laboratory

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