An Open-World Time-Series Sensing Framework for Embedded Edge Devices

Abstract

The rapid advancement of IoT technologies has generated much interest in the development of learning-based sensing applications on embedded edge devices. However, these efforts are being challenged by the need to adapt to unforeseen conditions in an open-world environment. Updating a learning model suffers from the lack of training data as well as the high computational demand beyond that available on edge devices. In this paper, we propose an open-world time-series sensing framework for making inferences from time-series sensor data and achieving incremental learning on an embedded edge device with limited resources. The proposed framework is able to achieve two essential tasks, inference and learning, without requiring access to a powerful cloud server. We discuss the design choices made to ensure satisfactory learning performance and efficient resource usage. Experimental results demonstrate the ability of the system to incrementally adapt to unforeseen conditions and to effectively run on a resource-constrained device.