WearableBridge: Task-Guided Latent Transport for Free-Living Activity Recognition

Jingjing Zou, Yixin Wang

Wrist-worn accelerometers make activity monitoring feasible at scale, but incidental arm motion, device orientation, and shifting context blur the signal that separates activities. Calibration studies supply higher-quality references such as concurrent thigh recordings or supervised laboratory wrist sessions, but they are expensive, cover few participants, and are rarely available at deployment. How can limited reference data improve recognition for participants who wear only a wrist device? We propose WearableBridge, which holds the reference encoder and classifier fixed and learns a task-guided transport map, the bridge, that carries each wrist feature into the region the classifier associates with its activity. Reference features or the classifier's predictions indicate the destination, and a classification loss penalizes wrist features that land in the region of another activity. We instantiate WearableBridge with three bridges: Mapper regresses onto reference features, Distillation matches the classifier's class probabilities, and MeanFlow learns a one-step flow from wrist toward reference features. On 40 held-out free-living PAAWS participants, all three bridges improve…