Paper Info
Title
BioWolf: A sub-10 mW 8-channel Advanced Brain Computer Interface Platform with a 9-core processor and BLE connectivity.
Abstract
Advancements in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and machine learning techniques have boosted the popularity of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), where electroencephalography (EEG) is a widely accepted method to enable intuitive human-machine interaction. Nevertheless, the evolution of such interfaces is currently hampered by the unavailability of embedded platforms capable of delivering the required computational power at high energy efficiency and allowing for a small and unobtrusive form factor. To fill this gap, we developed BioWolf, a highly wearable (40x20x2mm) BCI platform based on Mr. Wolf, a Parallel Ultra Low Power system on chip featuring nine RISC-V cores with DSP-oriented instruction set extensions. BioWolf also integrates a commercial 8-channel medical-grade analog-to-digital converter, and an ARM-Cortex M4 microcontroller unit (MCU) with Bluetooth low-energy connectivity. To demonstrate the capabilities of the system, we implemented and tested a BCI featuring Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) of steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP). The system achieves an average information transfer rate of 1.46 bits per second (bps) (aligned with the state-of-the-art of bench-top systems). Thanks to the reduced power envelope of the digital computational platform, which consumes less than the analog front-end, the total power budget is just 6.31 mW, providing up to 38 hrs operation (65 mAh battery). To our knowledge, our design is the first to explore the significant energy boost of a parallel MCU with respect to single-core MCUs for CCA-based BCI.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/TBCAS.2019.2927551
IEEE transactions on biomedical circuits and systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Blockchain,Protocols,Privacy,Charging stations,Electric vehicle charging,Public key,Elliptic curves
Power budget,Digital signal processing,Computer science,Instruction set,Wearable computer,Communication channel,Electronic engineering,Microcontroller,Computer hardware,Multi-core processor,Bluetooth
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
13
5
1940-9990
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.39
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Victor Kartsch171.87
Giuseppe Tagliavini2213.91
Marco Guermandi3518.14
Simone Benatti48716.94
Davide Rossi541647.47
Luca Benini6131161188.49