Light-weight embedded systems for medical monitoring are often referred to low-profile, small size, unobtrusive and potable processing elements with limited power resources. Such systems typically incorporate sensing, processing and communications and are often manufactured to be simple and cost-effective. Being low profile and wearable immediately implies the limitations in computational capabilities, memory (storage), speed and I/O interfaces. In this tutorial, we portray a brief description of low-power and light-weight embedded systems; present two pilot applications; and illustrate their corresponding design challenges. We specifically discuss the reconfiguration technqiues. International Federation for Information Processing 2007.
