Utility of synthetic musculoskeletal gaits for generalizable healthcare applications

Deep-neural-network-based artificial intelligence enables quantitative gait analysis with commodity sensors. However, current gait-analysis models are usually specialized for specific clinical populations and sensor settings due to the limited size and diversity of available datasets. We propose an approach that involves using synthetic gaits generated using a generative model learned via physics-based simulation with a broad spectrum of musculoskeletal parameters and evaluated its utility for data-efficient generalization of gait-analysis models across different clinical populations and sensor settings. The model trained solely on synthetic data estimates gait parameters with comparable or superior performance compared with real-data-trained models specialized for specific populations and sensor settings. Pre-training on synthetic data with self-supervised learning consistently enhances model performance and data efficiency in adapting to multiple gait-based downstream tasks. The results indicate that our approach offers an efficient means to augment data size and diversity for developing generalizable healthcare applications involving sensor-based gait analysis.