SBIR Phase II: Low power hardware-software subsystem for intelligent sensory stream analysis

该项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是显著减少连续传感应用的开发工作，并使其能够部署在各种电池受限的传感设备中，包括智能手机、平板电脑和智能手表等个人移动的设备;用于跟踪EKG/EEG和其他生命信号的可穿戴健康监测设备;以及用于监测结构完整性、排放水平、污染物浓度或地震数据的遥感装置。在这些应用中，连续感测触发上下文和位置感知计算或通信，以响应设备中的感官刺激？的环境。如果在超低功耗感官处理的发展中没有巨大的创新，连续感测将仍然是一个利基应用，仅限于具有稳定和充足电源的环境。相比之下，本项目将展示连续传感在移动的和远程环境中的可行性和潜在的广泛部署。为这些和其他应用灵活部署连续传感的能力有可能彻底改变这些市场，并创造全新的和不可预见的应用领域，大大改变了网络物理系统与其物理环境交互的程度。这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第2阶段项目将开发一个完整的软件和硬件平台，用于开发和部署识别和响应空间和时间触发签名的应用程序（感兴趣的事件）的连续传感数据流。当前的感觉处理平台依赖于耗电的应用处理器来分析真实的世界现象的连续感觉流以识别触发签名，并且应用开发是繁琐的并且需要大量的领域专业知识。所提出的方法将连续感测和触发签名检测从耗电的应用处理器卸载到部署在低功耗微控制器上的固件中或作为自定义硬件加速器的识别引擎。此外，还将提供一个集成的软件开发工具包，以简化复杂传感应用程序的实施，从而广泛采用并在未来提供始终在线的基于传感器的应用程序。该项目的结果将是一个软件实现的新的神经启发算法/固件优化部署在目前可用的智能手机上，一个软件工具包，使始终在线的传感应用程序的简单和快速的开发，和一个新的超低功耗，神经启发的传感数据预处理器。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to significantly reduce the development effort for continuous sensing applications and to enable deploying them in a wide range of battery-constrained sensing devices, including personal mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, and smart watches; wearable health monitoring devices for tracking EKG/EEG and other vital signals; and remote sensing devices for monitoring structural integrity, emission levels, pollutant concentrations, or seismic data. In these applications, continuous sensing triggers context- and location-aware computation or communication in response to sensory stimuli in the device?s environment. Without dramatic innovations in the development of ultra-low power sensory processing, continuous sensing will remain a niche application limited to environments with a stable and plentiful power source. In contrast, this project will demonstrate the viability and potential widespread deployment of continuous sensing in mobile and remote environments. The ability to flexibly deploy continuous sensing for these and other applications has the potential to revolutionize these markets and create entirely new and unforeseen application domains, dramatically altering the extent to which cyber-physical systems can interact with their physical environments.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project will develop a complete software and hardware platform for developing and deploying applications that identify and respond to spatial and temporal trigger signatures (events of interests) in continuous sensory data streams. Current sensory processing platforms rely on a power-hungry application processor to analyze continuous sensory streams of real world phenomena to identify trigger signatures, and application development is cumbersome and requires significant domain expertise. The proposed approach offloads continuous sensing and trigger signature detection from the power-hungry application processor to a recognition engine deployed either in firmware on a low-power microcontroller or as a custom hardware accelerator. Furthermore, an integrated software development toolkit will be provided to streamline implementation of sophisticated sensing applications, leading to widespread adoption and future availability of always-on, sensor-based applications. The result of this project will be a software implementation of the novel neurally-inspired algorithm/firmware optimized to be deployed on currently available smartphones, a software toolkit that enables easy and rapid development of always-on sensing applications, and a novel ultra low power, neurally-inspired sensory data preprocessor.