Maxwell A Xu

Prithviraj Tarale, Kiet Chu, Abhishek Varghese et al.

Wearable accelerometers have enabled large-scale health and wellness monitoring, yet learning robust human-activity representations has been constrained by the scarcity of labeled data. While self-supervised learning offers a potential remedy, existing approaches treat sensor streams as unstructured time series, overlooking the underlying biological structure of human movement, a factor we argue is critical for effective Human Activity Recognition (HAR). We introduce a novel tokenization strategy grounded in the submovement theory of motor control, which posits that continuous wrist motion is composed of superposed elementary basis functions called submovements. We define our token as the movement segment, a unit of motion composed of a finite sequence of submovements that is readily extractable from wrist accelerometer signals. By treating these segments as tokens, we pretrain a Transformer encoder via masked movement-segment reconstruction to model the temporal dependencies of movement segments, shifting the learning focus beyond local waveform morphology. Pretrained on the NHANES corpus (approximately 28k hours; approximately 11k participants; approximately 10M windows), our representations outperform strong wearable SSL baselines across six subject-disjoint HAR benchmarks. Furthermore, they demonstrate stronger data efficiency in data-scarce settings. Code and pretrained weights will be made publicly available.

Amin Adibi, Xu Cao, Zongliang Ji et al.

The fourth Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) symposium was held in person on December 15th and 16th, 2024, in the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The symposium included research roundtable sessions to foster discussions between participants and senior researchers on timely and relevant topics for the ML4H community. The organization of the research roundtables at the conference involved 13 senior and 27 junior chairs across 13 tables. Each roundtable session included an invited senior chair (with substantial experience in the field), junior chairs (responsible for facilitating the discussion), and attendees from diverse backgrounds with an interest in the session's topic.

Wanting Mao, Maxwell A Xu, Harish Haresamudram et al.

Modeling multi-modal time-series data is critical for capturing system-level dynamics, particularly in biosignals where modalities such as ECG, PPG, EDA, and accelerometry provide complementary perspectives on interconnected physiological processes. While recent self-supervised learning (SSL) advances have improved unimodal representation learning, existing multi-modal approaches often rely on CLIP-style contrastive objectives that overfit to easily aligned features and misclassify valid cross-modal relationships as negatives, resulting in fragmented and non-generalizable embeddings. To overcome these limitations, we propose ProtoMM, a novel SSL framework that introduces a shared prototype dictionary to anchor heterogeneous modalities in a common embedding space. By clustering representations around shared prototypes rather than explicit negative sampling, our method captures complementary information across modalities and provides a coherent "common language" for physiological signals. In this work, we focus on developing a Pulse Motion foundation model with ProtoMM and demonstrate that our approach outperforms contrastive-only and prior multimodal SSL methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance while offering improved interpretability of learned features.