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PPG-Distill: Efficient Photoplethysmography Signals Analysis via Foundation Model Distillation

Published: September 23, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2509.19215v1

By: Juntong Ni , Saurabh Kataria , Shengpu Tang and more

Potential Business Impact:

Makes smartwatches understand heartbeats better, faster.

Business Areas:
Water Purification Sustainability

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is widely used in wearable health monitoring, yet large PPG foundation models remain difficult to deploy on resource-limited devices. We present PPG-Distill, a knowledge distillation framework that transfers both global and local knowledge through prediction-, feature-, and patch-level distillation. PPG-Distill incorporates morphology distillation to preserve local waveform patterns and rhythm distillation to capture inter-patch temporal structures. On heart rate estimation and atrial fibrillation detection, PPG-Distill improves student performance by up to 21.8% while achieving 7X faster inference and reducing memory usage by 19X, enabling efficient PPG analysis on wearables

Page Count
9 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)