mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

FemWear: A Parameter-Efficient Wearable Foundation Model for Women's Health

arXiv 2608.08244 ↗First posted 8 Aug 2026cs.AIcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

General-purpose wearable foundation models are pretrained on broad sensor streams and populations, but their representations are not organized around women's health. FemWear is a women's wearable foundation model, obtained by parameter-efficiently repurposing a pretrained general multimodal wearable backbone into a specialized representation for women's health. It keeps the pretrained patch projection and Transformer encoder frozen and trains 239,236 encoder parameters - 1.11% of a 21.54M-parameter encoder - through low-rank residual adapters and causal task-family heads, producing one shared longitudinal representation for menstrual, symptom, affective, sleep/recovery, autonomic, activity, and pregnancy outcomes. We evaluate six cohorts with 63 comparable primary metrics, 33 from women's-health cohorts, while retaining the 32-task OpenMHC ability-retention benchmark. On a fixed participant split over three seeds, FemWear improved cycle-phase macro-F1 by 8.15% and reduced mean absolute error for cramps, mood symptoms, and sleep problems by 9.32%, 5.80%, and 9.43%; 24-hour onset AUPRC decreased by 3.40%. A stricter 42-participant nested leave-one-participant-out audit retained positive changes for 24-hour onset (+2.87%), 72-hour onset (+6.35%), and cramps (+2.19%), while phase, mood, and sleep changes were neutral or negative and no endpoint had a strictly positive corrected confidence interval. Capacity-matched experiments beat a latest-day multilayer perceptron but not shared-GRU or multi-gate mixture-of-experts baselines. Train-only calibration reduced onset expected calibration error by 84.2-88.2% with zero temporal-nesting violations. FemWear is therefore a women's wearable foundation model: a reproducible, parameter-efficient specialization delivering targeted transfer across women's-health tasks and coherent probability outputs.

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References · 11

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,084
  3. 2017On Calibration of Modern Neural Networkscited by 4,860
  4. 2019Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLPcited by 4,195
  5. 2014Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translationcited by 4,016
  6. 2019Which Tasks Should Be Learned Together in Multi-task Learning?cited by 367
  7. 2024PaPaGei: Open Foundation Models for Optical Physiological Signalscited by 64
  8. 2024Scaling Wearable Foundation Modelscited by 57
  9. 2024Repurposing Foundation Model for Generalizable Medical Time Series Classificationcited by 6
  10. 2024Generalized Prompt Tuning: Adapting Frozen Univariate Time Series Foundation Models for Multivariate Healthcare Time Seriescited by 5
  11. 2026OpenMHC: Accelerating the Science of Wearable Foundation Modelscited by 1

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  3. 2025Reducing Annotation Burden in Physical Activity Research Using Vision-Language Models
  4. 2026WearableQA: A Benchmark for Health Reasoning over Real-World Wearable Data
  5. 2026Retrieval-Augmented Personalization with Foundation Models for Wearable Stress Detection
  6. 2024Graph-Augmented LLMs for Personalized Health Insights: A Case Study in Sleep Analysis
  7. 2026SOTER: A Generative Time-Series Foundation Model for Wearable Human Physiological Signals
  8. 2024Transforming Wearable Data into Personal Health Insights using Large Language Model Agents