Pramod Rudrapatna

Peng Cao, Zhijian Yang, Tennison Liu et al.

Wearable sensors enable the continuous acquisition of high-resolution physiological waveforms, such as photoplethysmography and accelerometry, under free-living conditions. However, inferring health-related phenotypes from these signals presents significant challenges due to high sampling frequencies, multimodal dependencies, and extreme sequence lengths (e.g., weeks of recordings), compounded by a scarcity of ground-truth labels. To address these challenges, existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methodologies typically follow two paradigms: (1) learning rich morphological representations from short waveform segments while collapsing longitudinal dynamics through simple aggregation, or (2) modeling behavioral patterns from coarse, hand-crafted features (e.g. heart rate, step counts) spanning longer horizons but foregoing subtle, predictive signatures in raw waveforms. To bridge this gap, we propose WavesFM, a foundation model utilizing a two-stage SSL framework for longitudinal physiological data. Specifically, we decompose the learning problem into two stages: first, a segment-level encoder is pretrained to extract local embeddings from short waveforms; subsequently, a temporal encoder is trained to model the sequence of these embeddings across a multi-day horizon. This hierarchical approach overcomes the computational complexity of high-resolution, long-sequence data, allowing the overall model to capture both local signal semantics and the complex circadian and inter-day variations governing physiological dynamics. Pretrained on over 6.8M hours (N=324k individuals) of recordings for the first stage and 5.3M hours (N=10k) for the second stage, WavesFM demonstrates superior performance across 58 diverse tasks spanning demographics, lifestyle, health conditions, and medications.

Elzbieta Gruzewska, Pooja Rao, Sebastien Baur et al.

Radar technology presents untapped potential for continuous, contactless, and passive heart rate monitoring via consumer electronics like mobile phones. However the variety of available radar systems and lack of standardization means that a large new paired dataset collection is required for each radar system. This study demonstrates transfer learning between frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) and impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radar systems, both increasingly integrated into consumer devices. FMCW radar utilizes a continuous chirp, while IR-UWB radar employs short pulses. Our mm-wave FMCW radar operated at 60 GHz with a 5.5 GHz bandwidth (2.7 cm resolution, 3 receiving antennas [Rx]), and our IR-UWB radar at 8 GHz with a 500 MHz bandwidth (30 cm resolution, 2 Rx). Using a novel 2D+1D ResNet architecture we achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.85 bpm and a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 1.42% for heart rate monitoring with FMCW radar (N=119 participants, an average of 8 hours per participant). This model maintained performance (under 5 MAE/10% MAPE) across various body positions and heart rate ranges, with a 98.9% recall. We then fine-tuned a variant of this model, trained on single-antenna and single-range bin FMCW data, using a small (N=376, avg 6 minutes per participant) IR-UWB dataset. This transfer learning approach yielded a model with MAE 4.1 bpm and MAPE 6.3% (97.5% recall), a 25% MAE reduction over the IR-UWB baseline. This demonstration of transfer learning between radar systems for heart rate monitoring has the potential to accelerate its introduction into existing consumer devices.