ATTE: An Innovative Ensemble Learning Method With Age-Group-Guided Fine-Tuning for Improving Personalized Blood Pressure Estimation

Precision medicine requires cuffless blood pressure (BP) estimation technologies to achieve high accuracy levels suitable for healthcare monitoring. Recent advances, notably in personalized BP estimation methods utilizing transfer learning, have partially met these requirements. However, traditional personalized fine-tuning pipelines often ignore key physiological factors across age groups, thus limiting their effectiveness. This study identifies an important fine-tuning principle: target subjects benefit most when fine-tuned using a source model pretrained on an age-matched group. We introduce a novel two-level ensemble learning method, ATTE, which integrates multiple BP models for cuffless BP estimation based on pulse waves. It first performs feature-level ensemble learning (FEL) to combine age-group-specific fine-tuned models and enrich representations, then applies an optimized Bayesian model averaging (BMA) method that adaptively weights model outputs to boost accuracy and reduce model-selection uncertainty. Using only 50 transfer samples, ATTE improved systolic and diastolic BP estimation accuracy by 6.55% and 5.58% on a public dataset, compared to the traditional fine-tuning paradigm. It also achieved improvements of 5.10% and 8.30% on a self-collected dataset, which has been preliminarily validated in an elderly care scenario. Ablation and interpretability analyses validated the age-matched fine-tuning principle, the effectiveness of ATTE, and its model-agnostic generalizability. This work represents a pioneering step in optimizing personalized BP estimation and underscores its significant potential for real-world healthcare applications.