Abstract
arXiv:2510.18668v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The vast majority of cardiovascular diseases may be preventable if early signs and risk factors are detected. Cardiovascular monitoring with body-worn sensor devices like sensor patches allows for the detection of such signs while preserving the freedom and comfort of patients. However, the analysis of the sensor data must be robust, reliable, efficient, and highly accurate. Deep learning methods can automate data interpretation, reducing the workload of clinicians. In this work, we analyze the feasibility of applying deep learning models to the classification of synchronized electrocardiogram (ECG) and phonocardiogram (PCG) recordings on resource-constrained medical edge devices. We propose a convolutional neural network with early fusion of data to solve a binary classification problem. The model is trained and validated on the synchronized ECG and PCG recordings from the Physionet Challenge 2016 dataset. Our approach reduces memory footprint and compute cost by approximately three orders of magnitude compared with the state-of-the-art while maintaining competitive accuracy. We further demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model on medical edge devices by measuring its energy consumption on a microcontroller equipped with a neural processing unit (NPU) and benchmarking the energy of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication on a representative BLE evaluation kit across a range of payload sizes. The comparison confirms that on-device inference can be more energy efficient than continuous data streaming.