Estimation of Lower Extremity Joint Moments and 3D Ground Reaction Forces Using IMU Sensors in Multiple Walking Conditions: A Deep Learning Approach

Human kinetics, specifically joint moments and ground reaction forces (GRFs) can provide important clinical information and can be used to control assistive devices. Traditionally, collection of kinetics is mostly limited to the lab environment because it relies on data that measured from a motion capture system and floor-embedded force plates to calculate the dynamics via musculoskeletal models. This spatially limited method makes it extremely challenging to measure kinetics outside the laboratory in a variety of walking conditions due to the expensive device setup and large space required. Recently, employing machine learning with IMU sensors are suggested as an alternative method for biomechanical analyses. Although these methods enable estimating human kinetic data outside the laboratory by linking IMU sensor data with kinetics dataset, they were limited to show inaccurate kinetic estimates even in highly repeatable single walking conditions due to the employment of generic deep learning algorithms. Thus, this paper proposes a novel deep learning model, KineticsFM-DLR-Ensemble-Net to estimate the hip, knee, and ankle joint moments in the sagittal plane and 3 dimensional ground reaction forces (GRFs) using three IMU sensors on the thigh, shank, and foot under several representative walking conditions in daily living, such as treadmill, level-ground, stair, and ramp with different walking speeds. This is the first study that implements both joint moments and GRFs in multiple walking conditions using IMU sensors via deep learning. Our deep learning model is versatile and accurate for identifying human kinetics across diverse subjects and walking conditions and our model outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning model for kinetics estimation by a large margin.