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The NEURAghe architecture has proved to be a powerful accelerator for deep convolutional neural networks running on heterogeneous architectures based on Xilinx Zynq-7000 all programmable system-on-chips. NEURAghe exploits the processing system and the programmable logic available in these devices to improve performance through parallelism, and to widen the scope of use-cases that can be supported. In this letter, we extend the NEURAghe template-based architecture to guarantee design-time scalability to multiprocessor SoCs with vastly different cost, size, and power envelope, such as Xilinx’s Z-7007s, Z-7020, and Z-7045. The proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance and cost effectiveness in all the analyzed configurations, reaching up to 335 GOps/s on the Z-7045. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Telemonitoring is a branch of telehealth that aims at remotely monitoring vital signs, which is important for chronically ill patients and the elderly living alone. The available standalone devices and applications for the self-monitoring of health parameters largely suffer from interoperability problems; meanwhile, telemonitoring medical devices are expensive, self-contained, and are not integrated into user-friendly technological platforms for the end user. This paper presents the technical aspects and usability assessment of the telemonitoring features of the HEREiAM platform, which supports heterogeneous information technology systems. By exploiting a service-oriented architecture, the measured parameters collected by off-the-shelf Bluetooth medical devices are sent as XML documents to a private cloud that implements an interoperable health service infrastructure, which is compliant with the most recent healthcare standards and security protocols. This Android-based system is designed to be accessible both via TV and portable devices, and includes other utilities designed to support the elderly living alone. Four usability assessment sessions with quality-validated questionnaires were performed to accurately understand the ease of use, usefulness, acceptance, and quality of the proposed system. The results reveal that our system achieved very high usability scores even at its first use, and the scores did not significantly change over time during a field trial that lasted for four months, reinforcing the idea of an intuitive design. At the end of such a trial, the user-experience questionnaire achieved excellent scores in all aspects with respect to the benchmark. Good results were also reported by general practitioners who assessed the quality of their remote interfaces for telemonitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a portable, embedded, microcontroller-based system for bidirectional communication (recording and stimulation) between an electrode, implanted in the peripheral nervous system, and a host computer. The device is able to record and digitize spontaneous and/or evoked neural activities and store them in data files on a PC. In addition, the system has the capability of providing electrical stimulation of peripheral nerves, injecting biphasic current pulses with programmable duration, intensity, and frequency. The recording system provides a highly selective band-pass filter from 800 Hz to 3 kHz, with a gain of 56 dB. The amplification range can be further extended to 96 dB with a variable gain amplifier. The proposed acquisition/stimulation circuitry has been successfully tested through in vivo measurements, implanting a tf-LIFE electrode in the sciatic nerve of a rat. Once implanted, the device showed an input referred noise of 0.83 \,\muVrms, was capable of recording signals below 10 \muV, and generated muscle responses to injected stimuli. The results demonstrate the capability of processing and transmitting neural signals with very low distortion and with a power consumption lower than 1 W. A graphic, user-friendly interface has been developed to facilitate the configuration of the entire system, providing the possibility to activate stimulation and monitor recordings in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]