GaitVista: Reliability-Aware AI Measurement toward Accessible Longitudinal Gait Assessment
Authors: Nethmi Jayasinghe, Mihir Parashar, Amit Ranjan Trivedi
Organizations: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. · Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, Aurora, IL, USA.
Tracking recovery of walking function requires detecting meaningful gait change across rehabilitation sessions, yet objective 3D measurement remains confined to specialized motion-capture laboratories. Small camera sets and body-worn inertial sensors broaden access, but reliability varies across joints and time, allowing sensing failures to masquerade as patient change. We present GaitVista, a reliability-aware measurement layer whose lightweight gate assigns joint- and frame-specific visual contributions using camera coverage, local visual quality, cross-modal disagreement, and root-motion continuity, and exposes them for inspection. Across seven clean and degraded sensing conditions on TotalCapture, GaitVista reduces average full-body and lower-body error by 27.7% and 27.8%, attains the lowest worst-condition error among fusion methods, and reduces the gap to a joint-frame oracle from 2.76--5.33~cm for condition-blind baselines to 1.11~cm. On MoVi with image-derived keypoints, it is the only deployable fusion method to improve over both unimodal streams, reducing marker-supported error by 6.4% relative to the strongest learned fusion baseline. On TotalCapture, it improves bilateral knee-flexion waveform accuracy by 18.9%. Raw inertial measurements from five TotalCapture participants show location- and time-varying magnetic disturbance, supporting the design's reliability premise. Both benchmarks contain neurologically healthy participants in controlled settings and retain participant-specific IMU calibration; we therefore report progress toward accessible gait assessment, not validated clinical deployment.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of GaitVista. A small camera set and body-worn IMUs produce complementary visual and inertial pose estimates. Joint- and frame-specific reliability cues drive an inspectable fusion gate, yielding fused motion, assigned modality contributions, standardized avatar views, and gait measures for longitudinal review.
Figure 2: Location- and time-varying inertial disturbance in TotalCapture. (a) Magnetic dip-angle deviation across sensor locations for five walking2 participants. (b) Sensor with the largest magnetic-norm deviation over time; dashed lines separate participants, and marker size indicates the margin over the second-largest deviation.
MPJPE (cm) ↓
Gbest
Selector gap
Method
Mechanism
Avg.
Lower
Worst
(cm) ↑
(cm) ↓
Vision-only
Unimodal
6.88 ± 0.85
10.49 ± 2.22
19.21 ± 5.18
–
–
IMU-only
Unimodal
6.21 ± 1.50
9.06 ± 0.81
8.26 ± 1.41
–
–
Equal-weight fusion
Fixed blend
6.92 ± 1.58
9.72 ± 1.79
15.36 ± 6.47
−2.98
3.72
Kalman-Condition
Condition-tuned filter
4.98 ± 1.77
6.35 ± 0.62
11.02 ± 5.64
−1.04
1.78
Concat+MLP
Pose-input MLP
6.82 ± 1.36
8.75 ± 1.23
14.92 ± 5.29
−2.88
3.62
Table 1: Subject-disjoint TotalCapture results under 5-pixel keypoint perturbations. Values are mean ± population s.d. across five held-out participants after averaging five seeds and seven conditions. Worst is the maximum condition error per participant; lower is better except Gbest . Additional baselines are reported in the supplement.
Figure 3: TotalCapture under perturbed 2D observations. (a) Camera setup; (b) to (d) one-camera pose comparisons; (e) full-body MPJPE across camera counts; (f) lower-body MPJPE under sensing failures; (g) gain over the stronger modality; and (h) fixed-avatar rendering. Curves show mean ± population s.d. across five held-out participants after seed averaging.
Method
Avg. RMSE
Combined RMSE
ROM error
( ∘ ) ↓
( ∘ ) ↓
( ∘ ) ↓
Vision
12.04 ± 1.09
27.46 ± 2.18
27.84 ± 4.84
IMU
11.08 ± 1.03
25.17 ± 1.46
27.16 ± 4.44
Equal
10.58 ± 0.94
25.74 ± 2.45
25.54 ± 4.54
Concat+MLP
8.57 ± 0.81
26.36 ± 1.96
15.67 ± 2.63
GaitVista
6.95 ± 0.68
25.22 ± 1.53
14.97 ± 2.66
Table 2: Bilateral knee-flexion agreement on TotalCapture under five-subject LOSO. Combined denotes lower-body occlusion with IMU dropout. Values are mean ± population s.d. after seed averaging.
Method
MPJPE (cm) ↓
GbestM5
Marker-5
Ankle-2
Full-24
(cm) ↑
Vision
12.00 ± 0.81
12.61 ± 1.54
11.39 ± 1.09
–
IMU
49.70 ± 3.66
26.78 ± 1.36
32.99 ± 3.21
–
Equal
31.64 ± 1.58
23.50 ± 2.48
22.09 ± 1.62
−19.64
Concat+MLP
12.43 ± 1.05
12.61 ± 1.56
11.59 ± 1.27
−0.43
MoME
12.56 ± 0.92
13.55 ± 1.55
11.60 ± 1.23
−0.56
Table 3: Subject-disjoint MoVi results using MediaPipe keypoints from two synchronized views. Marker-5 and Ankle-2 are directly marker-supported; Full-24 partly relies on sparse-marker fitting. Values are mean ± population s.d. over five held-out participants after seed averaging.
Figure 4: MoVi evaluation with image-derived keypoints. (a) Synchronized views; (b) to (d) held-out pose comparisons; and (e) participant-wise Gbest over marker-supported joints. Positive values indicate improvement over both unimodal streams; error bars show variation across five seeds.
Variant
MPJPE (cm) ↓
Δ Avg.
Avg.
Lower
Combined
(cm) ↓
Static joint
7.05 ± 0.99
10.33 ± 2.01
9.53 ± 0.84
+2.74
No disagreement
4.69 ± 0.80
6.47 ± 1.15
9.18 ± 2.23
+0.38
No root continuity
5.03 ± 1.06
6.96 ± 2.00
9.43 ± 1.88
+0.72
No visual quality
6.60 ± 1.06
9.24 ± 1.90
9.39 ± 0.86
+2.29
GaitVista
4.31 ± 0.93
5.91 ± 0.44
9.11 ± 2.28
0.00
Table 4: TotalCapture ablations with 5-pixel keypoint perturbations. Values are mean ± population s.d. across five held-out participants after seed averaging. Avg. and Lower average seven conditions; Combined denotes lower-body occlusion with IMU dropout. Δ Avg. is relative to GaitVista, and Static joint uses only joint-specific preference.
Figure 5: Inspection prototype for one held-out sequence with (a) eight-camera and (b) one-camera sensing. Views show reconstructed pose, regional visual contributions, and bilateral knee-flexion trajectories. Contributions reflect modality use, not calibrated correctness.
This paper presents a biomechanically interpretable framework for gait analysis using 3D human reconstruction from video data. Unlike conventional keypoint based approaches, the proposed method extracts biomechanically meaningful markers analogous to motion capture systems and integrates them within OpenSim for joint kinematic estimation. To evaluate performance, both spatiotemporal and kinematic gait parameters were analysed against reference marker-based data. Results indicate strong agreement with marker-based measurements, with considerable improvements when compared with pose-estimation methods alone. The proposed framework offers a scalable, markerless, and interpretable approach for accurate gait assessment, supporting broader clinical and real world deployment of vision based biomechanics
Akila Pemasiri, Ethan Goan, Glen Lichtwark +3
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane · Griffith University, Gold Coast
Sparse inertial pose estimation promises camera-free motion capture from consumer devices, but consumer sensors are unreliable: firmware-fused orientations are biased, mounting varies between sessions, and streams drift or drop out. On a new 35-take single-subject benchmark pairing an earbud head inertial measurement unit (IMU) with two smart-insole foot IMUs (SAM-3D-Body pseudo-ground-truth labels), we show the reliability problem is channel-level: a channel ablation isolates foot acceleration as the most informative input (66.6 mm vs. 79.0 mm head-only) and the firmware-fused foot orientation as the liability that destroys the gain. We therefore let the model learn how much to trust each channel of each stream: one temporal gate per stream per channel block, trained with an auxiliary reliability objective on synthetically corrupted pretraining data. The channel-gated model is the most accurate of our learned fusion arms on clean data (69.4 mm vs. 83.7 static, 86.6 ungated) and under every simulated fault (bias in training; drift, dropout eval-only); its gates suppress the natively biased foot-orientation channels on clean real data without test-time supervision and flag dropout bursts at 0.92-0.999 AUROC. Two contrasts: dropping a channel known a priori to fail is flat across foot faults but collapses when an unanticipated stream fails (head dropout: 92.9 vs. 79.3 mm); and a fine-tuned HMD-Poser is more accurate on clean data (64.4 mm) and nominally under drift, with no significant paired difference under bias or dropout, but a larger worst-case degradation from clean (+16.1 vs. +3.5 mm, single seed). Learning to gate reliability instead of sensor count is the lever for deployable sparse inertial capture. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhilinGuo/reliability-gated-imu-fusion.
Zhilin Guo, Boqiao Zhang, Oszkár Urbán +8
University of Cambridge · Chalmers University of Technology
Video-based Clinical Gait Analysis often suffers from poor generalization as models overfit environmental biases instead of capturing pathological motion. To address this, we propose BioGait-VLM, a tri-modal Vision-Language-Biomechanics framework for interpretable clinical gait assessment. Unlike standard video encoders, our architecture incorporates a Temporal Evidence Distillation branch to capture rhythmic dynamics and a Biomechanical Tokenization branch that projects 3D skeleton sequences into language-aligned semantic tokens. This enables the model to explicitly reason about joint mechanics independent of visual shortcuts. To ensure rigorous benchmarking, we augment the public GAVD dataset with a high-fidelity Degenerative Cervical Myelopathy (DCM) cohort to form a unified 8-class taxonomy, establishing a strict subject-disjoint protocol to prevent data leakage. Under this setting, BioGait-VLM achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy. Furthermore, a blinded expert study confirms that biomechanical tokens significantly improve clinical plausibility and evidence grounding, offering a path toward transparent, privacy-enhanced gait assessment.
Erdong Chen, Yuyang Ji, Jacob K. Greenberg +5
Department of Computer Science, Drexel University · Department of Neurological Surgery, Washington University · University of California, Berkeley