FemWear: A Parameter-Efficient Wearable Foundation Model for Women's Health
Not on the map. Why?
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.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 11 of its 18 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2026.
Builds on
11 of 18 references.
References · 11
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,084
- 2017On Calibration of Modern Neural Networkscited by 4,860
- 2019Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLPcited by 4,195
- 2014Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translationcited by 4,016
- 2019Which Tasks Should Be Learned Together in Multi-task Learning?cited by 367
- 2024PaPaGei: Open Foundation Models for Optical Physiological Signalscited by 64
- 2024Scaling Wearable Foundation Modelscited by 57
- 2024Repurposing Foundation Model for Generalizable Medical Time Series Classificationcited by 6
- 2024Generalized Prompt Tuning: Adapting Frozen Univariate Time Series Foundation Models for Multivariate Healthcare Time Seriescited by 5
- 2026OpenMHC: Accelerating the Science of Wearable Foundation Modelscited by 1
Built on by
Not cited yet.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Wearable Foundation Models Should Go Beyond Static Encoders
- 2026Towards a General Intelligence and Interface for Wearable Health Data
- 2025Reducing Annotation Burden in Physical Activity Research Using Vision-Language Models
- 2026WearableQA: A Benchmark for Health Reasoning over Real-World Wearable Data
- 2026Retrieval-Augmented Personalization with Foundation Models for Wearable Stress Detection
- 2024Graph-Augmented LLMs for Personalized Health Insights: A Case Study in Sleep Analysis
- 2026SOTER: A Generative Time-Series Foundation Model for Wearable Human Physiological Signals
- 2024Transforming Wearable Data into Personal Health Insights using Large Language Model Agents