# PULSE: Agentic Investigation with Passive Sensing for Proactive Affective Intervention in Cancer Survivorship

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17679 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17679/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

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- [Detecting Receptivity for mHealth Interventions in the Natural Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08302/) (2020)
- [Enabling On-Device LLMs Personalization with Smartphone Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04418/) (2024)
- [Vital Insight: Assisting Experts' Context-Driven Sensemaking of Multi-modal Personal Tracking Data Using Visualization and Human-In-The-Loop LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14879/) (2024)
- [Leveraging LLMs to Predict Affective States via Smartphone Sensor Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08240/) (2024)
- [GLOSS: Group of LLMs for Open-Ended Sensemaking of Passive Sensing Data for Health and Wellbeing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05461/) (2025)
- [LENS: LLM-Enabled Narrative Synthesis for Mental Health by Aligning Multimodal Sensing with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23025/) (2025)
- [A Comparative Study of Traditional Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Large Language Models for Mental Health Forecasting using Smartphone Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03603/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cancer survivors face elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and emotional distress, yet self-report may be unavailable at some moments when support is relevant, a challenge we term the diary paradox. We present PULSE, a system for agentic sensing investigation: LLM agents equipped with eight purpose-built tools query smartphone sensing data, compare current behavior with personal baselines, and retrieve outcome-labeled historical cases. Rather than receiving only a fixed feature summary, agents choose which modalities and time windows to inspect. We evaluate PULSE through a two-by-two evaluation design crossing system architecture (structured single-pass vs. multi-turn agentic) with concurrent input modality (no current diary vs. sensing plus current diary) on 50 cancer survivors. The agentic multimodal condition achieves balanced accuracy of 0.743 for emotion-regulation desire; the agentic no-current-diary condition achieves 0.713 for self-reported intervention availability. This is a system-level comparison because the architecture conditions also differ in tool-mediated information access. The results provide a retrospective benchmark for interactive sensing investigation and motivate prospective evaluation at diary non-response moments.