Cited by 40Context-Aware Activity Recognition SystemsPhysical Activity and HealthNon-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring

Self-supervised transfer learning of physiological representations from free-living wearable data

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Spathis, Dimitris, Perez-Pozuelo, Ignacio, Brage, Soren, Wareham, Nicholas J., Mascolo, Cecilia·2021·Proceedings of the Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning

Abstract

Wearable devices such as smartwatches are becoming increasingly popular tools for objectively monitoring physical activity in free-living conditions. To date, research has primarily focused on the purely supervised task of human activity recognition, demonstrating limited success in inferring high-level health outcomes from low-level signals. Here, we present a novel self-supervised representation learning method using activity and heart rate (HR) signals without semantic labels. With a deep neural network, we set HR responses as the supervisory signal for the activity data, leveraging their underlying physiological relationship. In addition, we propose a custom quantile loss function that accounts for the long-tailed HR distribution present in the general population.

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  • The learned embeddings showed strong performance at inferring physiologically meaningful variables ranging from anthropometrics to fitness, outperforming unimodal autoencoders and common biomarkers.

    “The value captured by the learned embeddings was showcased through strong performance at inferring physiologically meaningful variables ranging from anthropometrics to fitness, outperforming unimodal autoencoders and common biomarkers.”
  • The model maps activity data to future HR responses and can be used as a feature extractor for wearable data.

    “The model maps activity data to future HR responses and can be used as a feature extractor for wearable data.”
  • We recently developed a self-supervised model which exploits the multi-modal data of modern wearables to learn meaningful representations which generalize to several outcomes with transfer learning.

    “Further, we recently developed a self-supervised model which exploits the multi-modal data of modern wearables to learn meaningful representations which generalize to several outcomes with transfer learning [144].”
  • The embeddings achieved an AUC of 0.68 for cardio-fitness prediction and an AUC of 0.80 for physical activity energy expenditure.

    “For instance, the embeddings achieved an AUC of 0.68 for cardio-fitness prediction and an AUC of 0.80 for physical activity energy expenditure.”

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Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Ting Chen, Simon Kornblith, Mohammad Norouzi, and Georey Hinton. 2020. A simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. In Interna- tional conference on machine learning. PMLR, 1597-1607.
  2. Nils Y Hammerla, Shane Halloran, and Thomas Plötz. 2016. Deep, convolutional, and recurrent models for human activity recognition using wearables. IJCAI (2016).
  3. Andrew M Jones and Helen Carter. 2000. The eect of endurance training on parameters of aerobic tness. Sports medicine 29, 6 (2000), 373-386.
  4. Mehdi Menai, Vincent T Van Hees, Alexis Elbaz, Mika Kivimaki, Archana Singh- Manoux, and Séverine Sabia. 2017. Accelerometer assessed moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and successful ageing: results from the Whitehall II study. Sci- entic reports 7 (2017), 45772.
  5. All of Us Research Program Investigators. 2019. The "All of Us" Research Program. New England Journal of Medicine 381, 7 (2019), 668-676.

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Authors
Spathis, D., Perez-Pozuelo, I., Brage, S., Wareham, N. J., & Mascolo, C.
Affiliations
  • University of Cambridge (GB)
  • University of Cambridge, UK
Venue
Proceedings of the Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning
Publisher
ACM
Published
2021-04-08
Pages
69-78
OpenAlex
W3110080536
Cited by
40
References
64
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 4
FWCI
2.37
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Cambridge University Engineering Department Publications Database (submittedVersion)
  • Apollo (University of Cambridge) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
  • Apollo (cc-by)
Funders
  • EPSRC (Grant DTP (EP/N509620/1), iCase fellowship (17100053))
  • Jesus College, University of Cambridge (Embiricos Trust Scholarship)
  • GlaxoSmithKline
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Context-Aware Activity Recognition Systems
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Physiology › Physical Activity and Health
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Non-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring
Keywords
self-supervised representation learning, transfer learning, wearable devices, smartwatches, physical activity monitoring, human activity recognition, heart rate, physiological signals, long-tailed distributions

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