DeMMO: Longitudinal and Cross-Disease Modelling of Digital Mobility Outcomes via Multi-Task Learning

Digital mobility outcomes (DMOs) derived from wearable sensors characterise mobility in daily life and offer a promising means of monitoring disease progression. However, existing DMO studies have typically focused on either a single disease or a single visit. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to define and study the practical problem of cross-disease longitudinal DMO modelling. We argue that this problem should satisfy at least two requirements. First, the temporal progression of DMOs should be modelled within each disease, as mobility-limiting diseases evolve over time. Second, multiple mobility-limiting diseases should be modelled jointly, as different diseases affect different aspects of human mobility. To address this problem, we propose DeMMO, an interpretable framework for longitudinal, multi-disease, and multi-outcome learning. Its central technical contribution is an interpretable cross-disease and cross-outcome relation-learning mechanism that infers signed relations directly from learned longitudinal DMO-outcome mappings, thereby enabling selective information sharing across cohorts without requiring paired participants. We evaluate DeMMO on the recently released, large-scale, multicentre Mobilise-D dataset, which presents a challenging modelling setting involving longitudinal observations, multiple clinical outcomes, and four participant-disjoint cohorts representing distinct mobility-limiting diseases. Compared with eight strong structural longitudinal and deep-regression baselines, DeMMO achieves the best overall predictive performance and outperforms the baselines for most individual outcomes. Stability selection further identifies reliable longitudinal DMO patterns that can inform subsequent clinical validation and disease monitoring. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/menghui-zhou/DeMMO.