Understanding the Representation of Older Adults in Motion Capture Locomotion Datasets

The Internet of Things (IoT) sensors have been widely employed to capture human locomotions to enable applications such as activity recognition, human pose estimation, and fall detection. Motion capture (MoCap) systems are frequently used to generate ground truth annotations for human poses when training models with data from wearable or ambient sensors, and have been shown to be effective to synthesize data in these modalities. However, the representation of older adults, an increasingly important demographic in healthcare, in existing MoCap locomotion datasets has not been thoroughly examined. This work surveyed 41 publicly available datasets, identifying eight that include older adult motions and four that contain motions performed by younger actors annotated as old style. Older adults represent a small portion of participants overall, and few datasets provide full-body motion data for this group. To assess the fidelity of old-style walking motions, quantitative metrics are introduced, defining high fidelity as the ability to capture age-related differences relative to normative walking. Using gait parameters that are age-sensitive, robust to noise, and resilient to data scarcity, we found that old-style walking motions often exhibit overly controlled patterns and fail to faithfully characterize aging. These findings highlight the need for improved representation of older adults in motion datasets and establish a method to quantitatively evaluate the quality of old-style walking motions.

Spectral Roll-off Points: Estimating Useful Information Under the Basis of Low-frequency Data Representations

Useful information is the basis for model decisions. Estimating useful information in feature maps promotes the understanding of the mechanisms of neural networks. Low frequency is a prerequisite for useful information in data representations, because downscaling operations reduce the communication bandwidth. This study proposes the use of spectral roll-off points (SROPs) to integrate the low-frequency condition when estimating useful information. The computation of an SROP is extended from a 1-D signal to a 2-D image by the required rotation invariance in image classification tasks. SROP statistics across feature maps are implemented for layer-wise useful information estimation. Sanity checks demonstrate that the variation of layer-wise SROP distributions among model input can be used to recognize useful components that support model decisions. Moreover, the variations of SROPs and accuracy, the ground truth of useful information of models, are synchronous when adopting sufficient training in various model structures. Therefore, SROP is an accurate and convenient estimation of useful information. It promotes the explainability of artificial intelligence with respect to frequency-domain knowledge.