PULSE: Personalized Opportunistic Learning for Wearable Devices

Wearable devices increasingly support personalized health and well-being applications, but post-deployment data can differ substantially from those used for training, while purely local adaptation may be limited by the data available on a single device during real-world operation. Conventional federated and decentralized learning rely on recurrent communication and stable connectivity, whereas existing opportunistic approaches often exploit available encounters without adequately considering their utility, compatibility, or communication cost. We propose PULSE, an event-driven framework for personalized opportunistic learning that treats each encounter as an online collaboration decision, selecting either no interaction or a promising nearby peer. Peer gradients are incorporated only when compatible with the local learning direction, while past interactions guide future peer selection. Across human activity recognition, fall detection, and stress recognition under synthetic and real contact traces, PULSE preserves or improves personalized classification performance, while reducing peer-assisted exchanges by 80-94% compared with opportunistic model averaging. On-device experiments further demonstrate its feasibility on wearable hardware: peer-assisted operations require limited energy, while the complete implementation occupies 149.8 KiB of RAM and 561.8 KiB of flash. The obtained results show that selective opportunistic collaboration can provide effective personalization while limiting communication and resource demands on constrained wearable devices.