A foundation model of wearable pulse oximetry reveals physiological signatures of health and cardiometabolic risk
Journal:
medRxiv
Published Date:
Jul 2, 2026
Abstract
While Photoplethysmography (PPG) is established as a noninvasive optical tool for monitoring heart rate and oxygen saturation, its high-resolution blood flow waveforms contain rich physiological data that extend far beyond conventional vital signs. We introduce PulseOx-FM, a foundation model, trained using self-supervised learning on 6,995,558 segments of pulse oximetry signals collected during 42,282 overnight sleep monitoring recordings of 10,704 participants in the Human Phenotype Project (HPP). Using chronological age as a global health benchmark, PulseOx-FM significantly outperformed existing open-source and proprietary feature extraction methods while demonstrating robust generalization in an external out-of-distribution cohort. PulseOx-FM representations predicted 64 phenotypic targets spanning cardiometabolic, and neuropsychiatric domains beyond demographic baselines, and prospectively identified two-year hypertension incidence in normotensive individuals. Nightly embeddings further tracked next-day glycemic, dietary and activity-based state within individuals, dissociating this signal from sleep architecture alone. This next-day glycemic signal was predominantly a direct physiological effect, not explained by next-day dietary intake. These findings suggest that PulseOx-FM provides a generalizable framework for encoding physiological patterns from sleep, offering a non-invasive tool for global health risk stratification and precision medicine.
