Concepts and architecture for a thumb-sized smart IoT ultrasound measurement system

Abstract

Abstract-This paper presents the technology concepts for a "thumb"-sized self-contained ultrasonic IoT measurement system. An overall architecture is proposed, and key elements are discussed with solutions using existing technology, thus arguing that realization is possible with the current technology.Such an ultrasonic IoT measurement system is constrained by its size and available energy, although it requires at least decent computational and communication resources. Because streaming data from such a device is not advisable from an energy viewpoint, there is a need for resource efficient (energy, memory and computational power) data analysis.An architecture with the following parts as well as some implementation details and performance data are proposed here:• Energy supply, battery and super capacitor • Transducer excitation achieving almost zero electrical losses • Event detection sensor interface • Data aggregation using sparse approximation and learned feature dictionaries, adapted to resource constrained embedded systems • IoT communication protocols and implementations enabling event -based communication and System of Systems integration capabilities The optimization of system level performance requires each subsystem to be optimized for the specific measurement situation taking into account the subsystem interdependencies. This can be performed using a combined electrical and acoustical model of the system. Here, the model allowing electronic and acoustic co-simulation using SPICE is an important tool bridging the electronic and acoustic domains.