arXiv · 2605.17679
PULSE: Agentic Investigation with Passive Sensing for Proactive Affective Intervention in Cancer Survivorship
Abstract
Cancer survivors face elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and emotional distress, yet self-report may be unavailable at some moments when support is relevant, a challenge we term the diary paradox. We present PULSE, a system for agentic sensing investigation: LLM agents equipped with eight purpose-built tools query smartphone sensing data, compare current behavior with personal baselines, and retrieve outcome-labeled historical cases. Rather than receiving only a fixed feature summary, agents choose which modalities and time windows to inspect. We evaluate PULSE through a two-by-two evaluation design crossing system architecture (structured single-pass vs. multi-turn agentic) with concurrent input modality (no current diary vs. sensing plus current diary) on 50 cancer survivors. The agentic multimodal condition achieves balanced accuracy of 0.743 for emotion-regulation desire; the agentic no-current-diary condition achieves 0.713 for self-reported intervention availability. This is a system-level comparison because the architecture conditions also differ in tool-mediated information access. The results provide a retrospective benchmark for interactive sensing investigation and motivate prospective evaluation at diary non-response moments.
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Zhiyuan Wang, Subigya Nepal, Ariful Islam, Indrajeet Ghosh, Xinyu Chen, Katharine E. Daniel, Laura E. Barnes, Philip Chow. 2026-05-17. PULSE: Agentic Investigation with Passive Sensing for Proactive Affective Intervention in Cancer Survivorship. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17679
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