Foundation model

CHARM

cycle-phase-supervised wearable foundation model for women's health (Terra)

PreprintCatalog paper date: 2026Added to atlas: Nov 5, 2026Source

Activity counts measure attention, not model quality. Missing counts are unknown. Publication status follows the linked source; a listed venue alone does not confirm peer review.

CHARM is a causal temporal convolutional network over 90 days of nightly ring-wearable summaries: skin-temperature delta, mean sleep HR, sleep respiratory rate, overnight HRV and lowest sleep HR (5 daily channels plus observation masks). It is pretrained on 38,064 users and 8.3 M days collected through the Terra API. The training objective combines masked-channel reconstruction with a luteal-vs-follicular phase classification loss, and the phase loss is the paper's main contribution.

Signals
Resp, Temp, HR, HRV
Form factor
Ring
Year
2026
Architecture

Causal TCN over a 90-day window of daily nocturnal features (10 input channels = 5 nightly channels (skin-temperature delta, mean sleep HR, sleep respiratory rate, overnight HRV, lowest sleep HR) + 5 observation masks); 1×1 conv to 128 ch, 4 residual dilated blocks (dilation 1/2/4/8, receptive field 61 d), 128-d per-day embedding

Pretraining data

Masked-channel reconstruction (whole channel hidden with p=0.3; loss weight 0.5) + luteal/follicular phase BCE on 38,064 users / 8.3 M days from ring wearables via Terra API (private)

License

Paper CC BY 4.0 (Research Square preprint); code proprietary, available on request; no weights

At a glance
Type
Foundation model
Modalities
RespTempHRHRV
Form factor
Ring
Parameters
Not reported
Architecture
Causal TCN over a 90-day window of daily nocturnal features (10 input channels = 5 nightly channels (skin-temperature delta, mean sleep HR, sleep respiratory rate, overnight HRV, lowest sleep HR) + 5 observation masks); 1×1 conv to 128 ch, 4 residual dilated blocks (dilation 1/2/4/8, receptive field 61 d), 128-d per-day embedding
Venue
Research Square preprint rs-10634632 v1 (posted 2026-11-02), CC BY 4.0
Year
2026
arXiv
Not reported
Code
Not released
Weights
Not released
Licence
Paper CC BY 4.0 (Research Square preprint); code proprietary, available on request; no weights
Caveats
Not reported
Added
Nov 5, 2026
Updated
Nov 5, 2026

Abstract

The menstrual cycle can be tracked through physiological signals captured by consumer wearables overnight — skin temperature, breathing rate, heart rate and heart rate variability — which act as proxies for the underlying hormonal variations. Other reproductive states, such as pregnancy or menopause, are often studied in isolation rather than as perturbations of the normal menstrual hormone rhythm, even though they are all governed by the same endocrine system. Here, we present CHARM (Cyclic Hormone-Aware Representation of the Menstrual cycle), a framework that learns menstrual cycle representations from wearable data by combining two training objectives: reconstruction of masked sensor channels, and a menstrual cycle phase (luteal or follicular) supervised loss. Phase supervision improves recovery of the underlying hormone dynamics from the learned representation. Without further training, frozen CHARM embeddings also generalise to multiple reproductive states and symptoms not seen during model training. The phase objective substantially improves this generalisation and is highly label-efficient, matching a strong baseline while using around 5-fold fewer labels for perimenopause and outperforming the baseline on menopause across all data regimes.

Verbatim fromthe publisher's DOI record· Publisher licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

CHARM: ChatPPG research summary card

Key results

How it works

How CHARM works: Input signals → Foundation model → Downstream tasksInput signals: Respiration (Breathing effort); Temperature (Skin temperature); HR; HRV. Dataset: mcPHASES: A Dataset of Physiological, Hormonal, and Self-reported Events and Symptoms for Menstrual Health Tracking with Wearables. Foundation model: CHARM (Convolutional network · Masked reconstruction). Downstream tasks: Menstrual cycle tracking (phase, period prediction).Input signalsRespiration: Breathing effortRespirationBreathing effortTemperature: Skin temperatureTemperatureSkin temperatureHRHRHRVHRVDataset: mcPHASES: A Dataset of Physiological, Hormonal, and Self-reported Events and Symptoms for Menstrual Health Tracking with WearablesDatasetmcPHASES: A Dataset of Physiological…Foundation modelCHARMConvolutional network · Masked…Downstream tasksMenstrual cycle tracking (phase, period prediction)Menstrual cycle tracking…

Datasets linked in the hub; pretraining vs evaluation roles follow the paper.

Pretraining data
Masked-channel reconstruction (whole channel hidden with p=0.3; loss weight 0.5) + luteal/follicular phase BCE on 38,064 users / 8.3 M days from ring wearables via Terra API (private)
Architecture
Causal TCN over a 90-day window of daily nocturnal features (10 input channels = 5 nightly channels (skin-temperature delta, mean sleep HR, sleep respiratory rate, overnight HRV, lowest sleep HR) + 5 observation masks); 1×1 conv to 128 ch, 4 residual dilated blocks (dilation 1/2/4/8, receptive field 61 d), 128-d per-day embedding
Inputs
Resp, Temp, HR, HRV
Approach
women's health · menstrual cycle · ovulation · pregnancy · TCN · ring

Devices· 1

Icons show the form factor: we have no openly licensed or manufacturer-cleared photo of these exact devices yet.

Leaderboard rows· 1

All leaderboards
TaskDatasetMetricValueRank
Menstrual cycle tracking (phase, period prediction)terra-ring-cohortmae_days ↓3.13#1 / 1

Datasets used· 1

Papers· 1

Authors· 5

Cite this model

Cite the publication recorded for this model. Check it against the publisher before submitting.

Díaz, R. M., Akhtar, F., Crawford, C., Brownlee, A., & Eleftheriou, K. (2026). CHARM: cycle-phase supervision for a wearable foundation model of women's health (Terra API; Research Square 2026). Research Square preprint rs-10634632 v1 , CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-10634632/v1
Díaz, Rocío Mexía, Faraaz Akhtar, Cameron Crawford, Alistair Brownlee, and Kyriakos Eleftheriou. 2026. "CHARM: cycle-phase supervision for a wearable foundation model of women's health (Terra API; Research Square 2026)." Research Square preprint rs-10634632 v1 , CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-10634632/v1.
Díaz, R. M., Akhtar, F., Crawford, C., Brownlee, A. and Eleftheriou, K. (2026) 'CHARM: cycle-phase supervision for a wearable foundation model of women's health (Terra API; Research Square 2026)', Research Square preprint rs-10634632 v1 , CC BY 4.0. doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-10634632/v1.
Díaz, Rocío Mexía, et al. "CHARM: cycle-phase supervision for a wearable foundation model of women's health (Terra API; Research Square 2026)." Research Square preprint rs-10634632 v1 , CC BY 4.0, 2026. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-10634632/v1.
R. M. Díaz, F. Akhtar, C. Crawford, A. Brownlee, and K. Eleftheriou, "CHARM: cycle-phase supervision for a wearable foundation model of women's health (Terra API; Research Square 2026)," Research Square preprint rs-10634632 v1 , CC BY 4.0, 2026, doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-10634632/v1.
@misc{diaz2026charm,
  title         = {{CHARM: cycle-phase supervision for a wearable foundation model of women's health (Terra API; Research Square 2026)}},
  author        = {Díaz, Rocío Mexía and Akhtar, Faraaz and Crawford, Cameron and Brownlee, Alistair and Eleftheriou, Kyriakos},
  year          = {2026},
  howpublished  = {Research Square preprint rs-10634632 v1 , CC BY 4.0},
  doi           = {10.21203/rs.3.rs-10634632/v1}
}

History

  1. Added to the ChatPPG research hub