Papers for

physical therapy software developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Monocular video enables gait analysis for spinal cord injury patients

Monocular markerless biomechanics for clinically interpretable gait assessment in spinal cord injury

Abstract: Three-dimensional gait analysis guides rehabilitation after spinal cord injury but depends on marker-based motion capture and force plates, which few clinics have. Monocular markerless pipelines have been established in fewer healthy adult cohorts but not in neurological cohorts. We present the SCAI SCI Gait dataset, comprising 239 adult individuals with spinal cord injury with synchronized video, motion capture, and force-plate measurements, we fitted a parametric body mesh to a single sagittal-view video, driving an anthropometrically scaled OpenSim model via virtual markers. Markerless lower-body kinematics showed state-of-the-art agreement with motion-capture measurements (r = 0.68-0.90, p < 0.001, and RMSE = 4.18-6.49 degrees), and accurate kinematics-based predicted ground-reaction forces closely matched those measured by force plates (r = 0.85-0.87, p < 0.001, and RMSE = 2.13-2.19 Newton per kg). Furthermore, conditional-dependence graph analysis with Markov blankets revealed that waveform components were conditionally associated with functional independence, and speed-stratified clustering revealed distinct mechanical strategies among individuals walking at similar speeds. These findings establish the use of monocular video as a scalable approach for clinically meaningful biomechanical assessment and data-driven phenotyping in patients with spinal cord injury. Github: https://github.com/SCAI-Lab/SCAI-SCI-Gait

Sun 4 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Gait analysis helps doctors understand how people with spinal cord injuries walk, but it usually needs special cameras and sensors that not many clinics have. The authors created a dataset from videos and sensors capturing 239 patients walking and developed a way to use just one simple video to measure walking movements and forces accurately. Their method matches traditional measurements closely and helps identify different walking patterns related to how independent a person is. This approach could make gait analysis easier and more available in clinics without expensive equipment.
Open → 2610.05552v1

Language aligned model improves gait severity estimates across clinical sites

3rd Place Solution to Human Motion Challenges in Real-World and Clinical Settings (MoCha) @ECCV2026: Language-Aligned Motion Representations for Domain-Generalizable UPDRS-Gait Severity Estimation

Abstract: In this work, we introduce language-aligned motion representations for domain-generalizable UPDRS-Gait severity estimation, aiming to learn semantically structured motion features that generalize across heterogeneous clinical domains. We first learn motion representations using a Bi-GRU backbone that captures the temporal dynamics of SMPL sequences. Prior to model training, motion captions are generated offline using Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. The backbone is then trained with both classification and text-alignment objectives to learn discriminative and semantically structured motion representations while accounting for the class imbalance present in the training data. We subsequently adapt the learned backbone independently to each source domain so that the model can capture domain-specific motion characteristics. The resulting source-specific models are then merged at the parameter level to consolidate complementary knowledge across source domains into a single domain-generalized model. To further mitigate class imbalance, we perform GPT-5.5-based pseudo labeling, and our final merged models for each site do not use any class-prior correction during inference. The resulting model is evaluated under the unseen-site setting of the MoCha Challenge, using Macro F1 as the primary evaluation metric. Our method achieves a macro-F1 of 0.57 on the hidden test set with only 637K active parameters at inference, ranking 3rd among 58 leaderboard entries in the MoCha 2026 Challenge. The challenge attracted 1,669 submissions from 112 participants and offered monetary prizes sponsored by Machine Medicine Technologies.

Wed 9 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Measuring how severe a person's gait problems are, especially for diseases like Parkinson's, is important but hard to do well in many different clinics. The authors created a new method that uses computer analysis of motion combined with language descriptions to better understand and compare walking patterns. They trained a model that learns from text descriptions of movements and adapts to different clinic settings, improving its accuracy across sites it hasn't seen before. This approach ranked third in a major challenge focused on real-world clinical gait assessment.
Open → 2609.10187v1