Abstract:Gait is increasingly recognized as a vital sign, yet current approaches treat it as a symptom of specific pathologies rather than a systemic biomarker. We developed a gait foundation model for 3D skeletal motion from 3,414 deeply phenotyped adults, recorded via a depth camera during five motor tasks. Learned embeddings outperformed engineered features, predicting age (Pearson r = 0.69), BMI (r = 0.90), and visceral adipose tissue area (r = 0.82). Embeddings significantly predicted 1,980 of 3,210 phenotypic targets; after adjustment for age, BMI, VAT, and height, gait provided independent gains in all 18 body systems in males and 17 of 18 in females, and improved prediction of clinical diagnoses and medication use. Anatomical ablation revealed that legs dominated metabolic and frailty predictions while torso encoded sleep and lifestyle phenotypes. These findings establish gait as an independent multi-system biosignal, motivating translation to consumer-grade video and its integration as a scalable, passive vital sign.
Abstract:Speech processing systems face a fundamental challenge: the human voice changes with age, yet few datasets support rigorous longitudinal evaluation. We introduce VoxKnesset, an open-access dataset of ~2,300 hours of Hebrew parliamentary speech spanning 2009-2025, comprising 393 speakers with recording spans of up to 15 years. Each segment includes aligned transcripts and verified demographic metadata from official parliamentary records. We benchmark modern speech embeddings (WavLM-Large, ECAPA-TDNN, Wav2Vec2-XLSR-1B) on age prediction and speaker verification under longitudinal conditions. Speaker verification EER rises from 2.15\% to 4.58\% over 15 years for the strongest model, and cross-sectionally trained age regressors fail to capture within-speaker aging, while longitudinally trained models recover a meaningful temporal signal. We publicly release the dataset and pipeline to support aging-robust speech systems and Hebrew speech processing.