Energy-Aware Distributed Edge ML for mHealth Applications With Strict Latency Requirements

Edge machine learning (Edge ML) is expected to serve as a key enabler for real-time mobile health (mHealth) applications. However, its reliability is governed by the limited energy and computing resources of user equipment (UE), along with the wireless channel variations and dynamic resource allocation at edge servers. In this letter, we incorporate both UE and edge server computing to satisfy the strict latency requirements of mHealth applications while efficiently utilizing the UE’s energy resources. Specifically, we separate the feature extraction and classification processes of Edge ML inference and formulate an optimization problem to distribute them between the UE and the edge server while determining the optimal UE transmit power. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach using an mHealth case study for predicting epileptic seizures using data from wearable health devices.